


Reload

by Sonora



Series: Reload 'verse [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Chuck Lives, Drug Withdrawal, Heavy Angst, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Multi, Rough Sex, Sexual Tension, Sibling Incest, Slow Build, Yancy Becket Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 02:21:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonora/pseuds/Sonora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yancy, Chuck, and Raleigh all have one thing in common; they survived the war.  But while Yancy has been dreaming for years about a reunion, Raleigh's been doing his best to move on, and thought, with Chuck, he finally could.  But misunderstandings threaten to tear them all even further apart than they already were</p><p>Or, the one where Yancy's running black ops missions, Raleigh's struggling to keep himself together, Chuck can't find the right words for anything, and the three of them try to find some modicum of happiness together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is Example A of Sonora trying to write herself through an issue, and I apologize for any of that in advance. I just... I have a lot of Yancy/Raleigh/Chuck feels right now, and I need to write this. I get like that sometimes. 
> 
> Sorry. Heh.

"What's next?"

"After this? Haven't seen the orders yet. Vladivostok for you, I'd reckon. Doubt the Kaidanovskis had the chance to set it all to rights before they left."

"What's keeping the mafia from stripping the place right now?"

"You ever see Aleksis in short sleeves?"

"...oh. Really?"

"Heir to the biggest family east of Lake Baikal, rumor was. Those are his people out there, won't do a damn thing to the tough old bastard's 'dome until... you eating that, mate?"

Rolling his eyes at his partner's usual shtick, Yancy shoves his half-eaten plate of tamales across the sticky little table. "You have an iron stomach, you know that?"

Scott Hansen grins back at him, picking a piece of heavily spiced masa out of the puddle of oil with his bare fingers. He still has blood from yesterday under his fingernails. "Growing up back o' the beyond, you gotta."

"Yeah, Australia's a bitch." Looking away, Yancy wipes his hands his filthy khakis, stretching a little in the uncomfortable plastic chair. 

Four weeks they'd spent up in the Andes, tracking their last target, and back down at sea level, his lungs are aching from the oxygen. It's a weird feeling. The low-level heartburn he's had since leaving Los Angeles seven months ago, moving down the shattered Pacific Coast, hunting down the remnants of the Church of Blue Light and the information they stole, hasn't helped.

Even in the northern winter, Lima reeks.

"You didn't tell me we had to kill the guy."

"I," Scott corrects, holding up a hand, still chewing, "killed that bloke. You just held him down. Don't beat yourself up, mate."

"No, why not?" Yancy mutters to himself, washing down the acrid chili taste with the last of his third beer, surveying the dark-washed, crowded street beyond their little perch at this counter. "No need, when I can beat up religious fanatics picking the bones of the PPDC instead?"

"Somebody's gotta do it, Becket..."

"Three years of this shit, _Hansen_ ," he sneers, dragging the surname out, "and six months since Pitfall. You and your goddamn boss..."

Scott's eyes narrow. "Whoa there, darlin', let's keep him outta this."

"You two fuckers fucking promised me..."

"We didn't know where Raleigh was."

"Pentecost found him easily enough." And Yancy drags a hand across his face, scrubs it through his hair. It's been days since he's had a proper shower or a change of clothes, weeks since he's had a proper night's sleep, and he's spent months listening to Scott feed him excuses about this. He should have been there for Pitfall. For Gipsy. For Raleigh. "Did you even try to look?"

Scott's normally hard face softens a bit. "We're not the bloody NSA, Yance. 'M sorry, mate. If we could have..."

Yancy sighs, and pushes back. 

_This is black-ops, disavowed shit. All we've got our the old military contacts and most everyone is dead. We told you that when you signed on; zero funding, no support, under the radar. No national government in the world would support this and that's why it's gotta happen..._

He's heard it all before. Heard it too many times. Doesn't get any easier with repetition. 

"Yancy, I'll talk to him. You've done enough. You should be able to..."

And quiet sympathy, from Scott, is the very, very last thing Yancy wants to hear.

"Look, I'm gonna go get myself a place to sleep," he sighs. "I've got my burner. You heard anything from the boss, you call me, alright?"

Scott nods, and holds out his hand. "Couldn't have managed all this without you, mate."

With another sigh, Yancy bumps fists and pulls his scarf tight around his unshaven neck. He hates the stubble, like he hates the dark, longish hair, but any little bit helps. 

"Call me tomorrow," Scott adds, calling after him. "Let me know you're not dead!"

"Yeah, yeah," Yancy grumbles to himself, and hits the broken concrete of the ragged sidewalk.

There are still nice places in Lima - beautiful parts of the town, untouched by the two kaijuu that made landfall over the past decade - but Yancy's not headed for any of those. A cheap, locally-owned business hotel would do the trick, with a couple hundred passed off to the concierge for some clean clothes, but Yancy can do that in the morning.

Right now, he's just drunk enough to allow himself a little something.

He goes west instead of north.

The red-light district.

This isn't exactly what Yancy had envisioned for his life; he'd never dreamed of being anything grand. College. Work. A house in Anchorage and a cabin in the mountains. Hunting trips on the weekends. A couple of dogs. Raleigh. That's what he'd wanted. That's all he'd wanted. 

Before the kaijuu came and fucked everything. Before mom died and dad left and Jaz left too. Before the PPDC and the Academy and Gipsy.

Before Knifehead.

It's easy enough to find what he's looking for. He remembers enough Spanish from high school, and has picked up enough slash along the way, to navigate the rambling streets with surgical precision. Seems like no time at all before he's found himself the thudding music and bad lighting that seems to grace strip clubs the world over.

For a moment, walking in, Yancy has the wildest sense of deja vu. Like he's back in Anchorage with the squadron, out for a night of fun, Raleigh's hand twisting in his under the table, saying in that quiet, sweet way of his that nothing up on stage meant a goddamn thing to him.

_You, Yancy, you're all I want, all I ever want. I love you so much..._

At least the kid's alive.

And this place has boys up on the stage.

Nothing like that in Anchorage.

Taking a seat at the end of the bar, Yancy orders something bottled and makes the bartender show him the seal before popping the cap off. It probably won't kill him, and while that may have disappointed him in the past, he's got something to look forward to. As much as it sucks, Vladivostok is on the right side of the dateline and a short eight hour plane ride away from Hong Kong, and maybe when he's done there, this bullshit will finally be locked down enough for him to leave.

It's been six months since Yancy found out his brother was alive. Almost six years since either of them have seen each other.

_Given enough, haven't I? Haven't we both given enough?_

And that little voice in the back of his head - the one that sounds like Scott - asks him again if Raleigh would even recognize him anymore. 

If Raleigh would want him.

If that would be fair to do to the kid.

He finishes that first beer, and is in the middle of considering a second, when the set ends and the music dims enough for him to catch the strains of a very familiar Aussie accent a few seats down.

Sounds exactly like Scott, for a moment.

A moment.

"... you haven't had anyone like me before..."

"Is that so, chiquito?"

"Yeah, you know I am, best you'd ever had. Just give me a taste..."

It's an Aussie, alright - white boy, broad shoulders, stocky, ginger, dimples, and...

Yancy almost chokes.

But tells himself that's insane.

It can't possibly be Chuck Hansen. 

There's no way. Not in this place, sitting next to some older Peruvian man who's got his fat, gross fingers on the kid's thigh. No way that arrogant little brat from the news reports and Scott's stories would put up with that. 

Not Chuck Hansen, hero of Pitfall, savior of the species.

Not Scott's nephew.

It's just some hooker propositioning a john. 

Nothing to worry about.

Yancy doesn't order another beer. If he's seeing shit like that, well, he figures he's well past his limit. He tosses a couple bills on the counter and collects his jacket, shrugging it back on over the worn outdoor gear he's got on. Still, he has to go past those two on his way out the door.

As he scoots behind, he bumps the white kid's chair a little. Just enough to tip him off balance.

"Oi, watch where you're going, cunt!"

Yancy's heart freezes up.

The kid's arm. A tattoo. Striker's logo. The same one Scott's got on his left shoulder.

Holy hell. 

"Yeah, punta. Off," the lard-ass john, or whatever, says, and sniffs dismissively, nodding towards the door.

"Sorry, man, didn't mean to," Yancy replies reflexively, resisting the urge to just grab the kid and run. Drugs. Drugs. Scott's going to be... "Just looking at your boy here. Quite a cutie, isn't he?" Biting down his own disgust at himself - he's down so much worse the past few years - pinches one sallow, pale cheek. "Couldn't help myself."

"Oi, 'm nobody's boy!"

"Yeah, hands off, my man. This little treat, he with me."

"Look," Yancy says, leaning into Chuck, dropping to an exaggeratedly drunken stage whisper, "I've spent like six weeks leading a photo safari up in the mountains, right, and I haven't had anything. You know? Like, nothing. Just ugly native bitches and sweaty old Canadian fuckheads. I'll make it worth your while."

Chuck flushes. The guy he's with bristles.

"You back off, man," the guy begins, standing up, hands coming up in loose fists. He's got fifty pounds on Yancy at least. "I saw him first, he m..."

Yancy doesn't let him finish. Grabs the bastard by neck and throws him around, slamming him face first into the sticky bar top and delivering a punishing blow to the back of his knee with a steel-toed boot. The guy goes down, hard, and, riled up as he still is from the last couple of nights, it's all Yancy can do to keep himself from bashing the fucker's kidneys in. 

Instead, he just looks down at the guy, breathing hard, clenching and unclenching a fist.

This isn't the kind of man he ever wanted to be. Isn't a place he ever wanted to find himself in.

But the world was ending, and now it hasn't, and he'd done this all on nothing but faith, and the fulfillment of that faith is right in front of him, and Yancy figures he can swallow his pride a little longer.

To do something about whatever the fuck is going on here.

In the low light from the glowing catwalk, Chuck's eyes are gleaming with something other than a junkie's lust. Yancy recognizes that look.

It's the way Raleigh used to look at him, when they were both young enough and innocent to think the world was a nice place to live.

Yancy's not sure if that makes this better or worse.

"You got a better offer, old man?" Chuck asks, cocking his head. He sounds hungry. He's starting to sweat.

"Premium shit, uncut, courtesy of some hiking buddies of mine from Colombia," Yancy smiles back, the words twisting in his guts, forcing them out anyway. "Come on, baby, I'll make you feel so good..."

The kid looks at the lard-ass sprawled at his feet, clutching his broken shin, and slips off the stool, smiling. It's a lopsided, grotesque parody of the grin he flashes for the cameras, and it settled like cold lead against Yancy's ribs.

He kicks the guy as he steps over him, and wraps his arms around Yancy's waist.

"Your place or mine?" he asks.

Yancy resists the urge to kiss him.

He hasn't kissed anybody in years.

Not since that morning, before they left their room, Raleigh flushed and smiling against the door, writhing happily against him, the taste of mint toothpaste and morning breath between them.

Eyes bright.

+++++

There are better places for this. Cheaper, less conspicuous places. Places where the staff wouldn't stare and Chuck wouldn't be shrunken to nothing inside Yancy's jacket. He could have done this anywhere, but if life's taught Yancy anything, it's that the more you pay for a hotel room, the more likely the staff are to let you destroy it.

He can explain the eight hundred dollars-a-night charge on the organization plastic to the boss later.

He's pretty sure he won't get any shit for it. 

Considering.

"Pretty tony for a tour guide," Chuck says, sauntering around, sort of looking at everything before settling down on the edge of the bed, leaning back, braced up on his hands. "This all for little old me?"

Yancy shrugs, making a little show of double-checking the deadbolt as he pulls up that program on his smartphone that freezes electronic locks like this. Chuck's going to go ballistic when he finds out Yancy doesn't have anything on him; he'd rather the kid not escape before he has a chance to talk to him. 

"Yeah, kid, sure. Cute piece of ass like you..."

"I'm not cute!"

He turns around, stuffing his hands in his pockets, and Chuck flinches a little. Yancy knows damn well what he looks like these days; nothing at all like the boy who got pulled out of bed at 0200 by the kaijuu alarms and an over-eager little brother. His hair's dyed dark, his right eyes has a bit of a tic in it, and his right hand is still a bit of a disaster. The circuitry scars are unmistakable, but hidden right now by jacket and long sleeves. No way Chuck recognizes him.

That's the look of a boy who just realized he's bitten off more than he could chew.

Yancy doesn't like the way it makes him feel.

"Okay, kid. You're not cute," he says, and strips his cable-knit sweater off, tossing it away. It's old, gross, but Raleigh knit it for him, back in the day, and Yancy's never managed to get rid of it. He can still feel his little brother's hands, pulling it on him, smoothing it out. For a long time, it was all he had of him. 

Chuck's eyes don't leave him.

He flicks open the passport he picked from the kid's pocket on the way over here. Authentic. Hong Kong. Charles Scott. Cute. His uncle would be pleased, but Yancy can't figure out how in the hell the kid might have gotten in. "What should I call you? Charlie? Chaz?"

The kid's mouth opens and shuts, his lips pressing into a thin line. "That's my passport."

Yancy squints at it. "You look good cleaned up, Charlie."

"Chuck."

"That's not very Australian of you, _Chuck_. How'd you pick that up? You do uni in the States?"

"The fuck you care what my name is?" Chuck snarls, and shoves up towards him, grabbing for the little red book. "You said you had blow, old man!"

Yancy yanks it out of reach. "Maybe I'm more curious about you."

"Get stuffed!" Chuck half-yells, and shoves him, hard, back towards the center of the room. "Where's the shit?"

And there's no more stalling. He's a bit soused and more than a little tired, but Chuck is in a bad way; twitching, sweating, hands trembling, eyes dilating. Yancy wonders when the last time he had a hit was.

Might make this easier. Or a hell of a lot worse.

"I lied," Yancy says, and spreads his hands. "I lied to get you here."

And Chuck's eyes go wide, panicked, and tears past Yancy to the door.

He doesn't bother turning around.

"It's locked, Ranger Hansen, and it's gonna stay locked," he explains calmly. "You aren't leaving."

And Chuck - predictably and almost to Yancy's relief - snaps.

It's nothing to get him to the ground and in a blood choke; kid's weak as a kitten right now. It's not fair and Yancy doesn't like doing it, but he needs a few minutes of peace before the chaos starts up, and this is better than any of the alternatives.

"Ra-Raleigh?" Chuck almost pleads, eyes watering, face red, voice fading. "Ral...pleee..."

"It's okay, kiddo," he whispers, grip iron-tight. "Shh, just go to sleep, let it go..."

"N-No, Ya... Yancy's'nt...Raleigh, Raleigh...you...promised..."

The last word comes out as a sob, almost too quiet to hear, and as the kid's body goes slack in his arms, Yancy tries not to think about what it means.

They both always thought the Hansen kid was cute. 

He lays there on the floor for a moment, Chuck's unconscious body limp against his, not quite stroking the kid's shoulder. What happened to bring him here, halfway around the world, to the slums of a dying city? 

"Either of us," Yancy mutters, suddenly exhausted.

Hefting the kid up onto one of the beds, he pads over to his discarded jacket for his burner phone.

Dials Scott's number.

Stares at it.

Erases it.

And types in a number he shouldn't even know.

The boss'.

It rings almost twenty times, the tone changing and shifting as it gets shuttled from one relay to another. Yancy waits, hating himself almost more than he did in the bar - Chuck needs help, Chuck needs _family_ , but Scott's family.

That's not why he's calling. Not the only reason.

Finally, somebody picks up.

"Scott, what's going on? I thought you reported mission success and had made contact with the demo team in Lima. What's..."

"It's Yancy, sir. You might be interested in something I found tonight. I'd like to bring it to you personally in Hong Kong."

"And see your brother."

"Y-Yes sir."

There's a long pause. "What is it?"

"It's your son, Herc."

His scars, under his sweater, are itchy with sweat.


	2. Chapter 2

They’re in Fiji, in a cab, coming back from their overnight at a hotel near Labasa Airport - the plane needed refueling and the pilots crew rest - before Chuck finally asks him.

“You’re really Yancy Becket, aren’t you?”

Yancy doesn’t take his eyes off his phone - even Scott’s grammatical slaughter of yesterday’s non-events is better than looking Chuck in the eye, he's found. It's too hard, looking the kid in the eye. Like staring into the sun. Hadn't the kid already used his name, too? The kid has definitely already said his name. “I told you that, like, half a dozen times.”

“Yeah, you’re really _him_.” And Chuck sighs, forehead on the window of the cab. The shadows around them shift. _International Depatures_ in six languages on the sign in front of them. They’re here. They’re almost _there_. “How are you even alive?”

“You sound like you’re not happy about it,” Yancy observes drily, and takes another gulp from his half-full water bottle. “Saved your ass, didn’t I?”

“Oi, arsehole, who said I wanted to be saved?”

Yancy sighs.

the news reports hadn't exactly lied.

He wants a drink, a real one, something stiff and hard and mind-numbing - he’s wanted one since leaving Lima. Nothing like the international dateline to fuck up even his ability to sleep.

But Herc evidently ordered the plane emptied and the nearest government-run liquor store to their hotel last night had been like a half-mile to walk, and it’s hot and muggy and nasty in Fiji this time of year, and...

And there’s Chuck to think about.

Now there’s Chuck.

Chuck. Who freezes cold when the cab stops, arrogance gone again. Who grabs Yancy’s arm as Yancy makes to open the door.

“Yancy, I...”

Outside the taxi, Fiji’s international terminal is buzzing with tourists, businessmen, backpackers; all the mobile detritus of globalization. People are beginning to travel again. 

It’s a good thing. Good sign.

But Yancy doesn’t care. Right now, he just wants to hide Chuck away from all of it. Keep him, where nobody can see him.

He doesn’t know how else to help the kid.

Fuck, he doesn’t know how to help the kid at all.

“What?” he says, pulling his feet back inside the cab and shutting the door. “What is it, kiddo?”

“I...” Chuck falters, eyes squeezing shut, lashes long against pale cheeks. “I can’t go back, I can’t, I’ve fucked everything up with... and...”

Yancy lays a hand against the kid’s neck, soft as he can manage. There’s a fragility beneath his fingertips that he doesn’t understand. Whether it’s nerves or the lingering effects of withdrawal of if something’s just _broken_ in the kid’s head, Yancy doesn’t know. And he wants to care. He does.

He _does_.

It’s just.

“Chuck, it’s gonna be fine,” he says quietly, rubbing the short, soft hair under his ear with a thumb. “You’re gonna be fine. Please. I need you with me on this, kiddo.”

Chuck nods slowly, eyes still closed. “We don’t go, you don’t get to see Raleigh.”

“Chuck,” he says helplessly. “It’s not... we’re in fucking Fiji, I mean, it’s not like we can just...”

“No, you’re right.” Those eyes open, full of something Yancy can’t read. “You’re right. He... we should go.”

Neither of them have much; Chuck’s small duffel and Yancy’s smaller backpack, civilian hiking gear that’s beat to shit and contains only the bare essentials. What’s in Chuck’s bag, Yancy’s got no idea. Some clothes, a toothbrush, he’s seen. The rest? He hasn’t wanted to pry.

Yancy collects both of the trunk. Doesn’t let Chuck carry his own, despite the bitching.

Kid’s still a little unsteady on his feet. 

Still, they move from curbside to gate seamlessly, unmolested, passing through the separate line for the private jet terminal. Security is more a formality than anything else for the ultrarich, in this part of the world, and Yancy’s glad. He might have handed his weapons off to Scott before leaving Lima two days ago - Aussie bastard’s staying on at the ‘dome, and hadn’t he been pissed when he heard about his nephew, even if he did refuse to see the kid - but his passport is forged. A good forgery, but still. 

He can’t exactly call the American consulate if he ends up in jail.

Herc would kill him.

Herc might kill him anyway, if he finds out about the strip club.

Yancy sort of wants to kill himself for that.

Thinking about it makes him feel dirty.

He hadn’t told Herc how bad it was, the night he called. What exactly was wrong. Just that Chuck was sick and needed to come back to Hong Kong as soon as the worst of it blew over _and given the situation, sir, I’d like to come with him, he needs somebody with him right now_. 

Herc hadn’t pushed. Just asked how much time Chuck needed.

Yancy, torn between wanting to help Chuck and needing to see his brother, told Herc a week.

“You... you wanna talk to him, Ranger?”

Chuck groaned, waking up. Yancy wanted to scream. “Gotta go, sir.”

“Call me when you get a chance. I’ll set it up.”

Yancy hadn’t gotten his chance.

The first forty-eight hours had been pure hell. Chuck had lost control of everything - his words, his emotions, his limbs, his bodily functions. Everything. It had been all Yancy could do to keep him from hurting himself. By the third morning, every pointed or sharp object in the room had been tossed out the window or into the hallway. The smell alone had been horrifying.

In a lucid moment, Chuck admitted that he had no idea what he’d been taking. “Whatever I could get my hands on,” he’d whispered, almost sad.

“Why?”

“I don’t have to fucking explain myself to you, arsehole! I didn’t ask for your help!” the kid had snapped, mood swinging fast. 

And, convulsing, he lurched for the toilet again.

Yancy followed, held him up by the shoulders, feeling his wasted body shake itself apart. “You may not want my help, Chuck, but as far as I’m fucking concerned, you’re not capable of making a goddamn decision for yourself right now. Until you sober up, I’m calling the shots.”

The kid had hit him for that.

The kid hit him a lot, in those first two days.

But that first time was the only time Yancy wasn’t able to stop himself, and hit back.

Hard.

And, as Chuck drew back against the toilet, fear mixing with rage on his face, helpless tears coming anew, Yancy remembered the time Raleigh got sick after mom left. Walking pneumonia they’d thought was Blue poisoning.

Raleigh could have died.

Yancy didn’t hit Chuck again.

Their plane, some sleek little Gulfstream with PPDC markings on the tail, is waiting at the end of the terminal for them now. The pilots are already aboard, not a flight attendant in sight. Closing up the cabin door himself, the co-pilot popping out to double-check the seal, Yancy has a flash of a stripper pole coming up from the floor, something out of one of those old movies he and Raleigh used to watch as kids.

“You okay?” Chuck asks, softer than he normally.

“Yeah,” Yancy says, brusque, and heads back for the little sleeper bunks in the back.

He locks it down, turns the air conditioning up, closes the black-out curtains, stuffs in the noise-canceling ear buds he bought in the Duty-Free at Jorge Chavez, and tries to force his body to fall asleep.

It’s not just about avoiding Chuck. He’s tired from last night - the hotel room was hot, and Chuck got to laughing over the Japanese gameshows on the crappy TV, and they’d stayed up, swapping travel stories from happier times. No sleep, it had turned out.

No sleep. 

There was a time in Yancy’s life when he never could manage to wake up before noon, and not sleeping at all, for a whole night, would have been unthinkable.

But Yancy slept a lifetime with that two year coma of his.

He tries not to make a habit of it anymore.

Except that the withdrawal had been rough on them both.

Chuck had cried. Swore. Raved. Pleaded. Beat his hands bloody on the wall and then screamed as Yancy tried to clean the wounds. Slept fitfully only to wake screaming. Shivered so violently Yancy thought he was having seizures.

The worst of it, though, had come in the middle of the second night, where, sitting on the bathroom floor, mopping sweat and bile off Chuck’s clammy face as Chuck lay slumped by the toilet, the kid had caught his hand.

“You can still have it, you know,” he’d said.

“Have what, kid?”

“Have me.” Chuck had smiled, grotesque and horrifying, twisting around and sliding around into Yancy’s lap. “Any way you want me. Anything. You can do anything to me, anything.”

“Chuck...”

“Please,” Chuck had whined, a loose, nerveless hand flopping down towards Yancy’s groin, “please Raleigh, just let me go, p-p-lease let me get high, fuck me, t-tear me apart, I d-don’t care, fuck me, fuck...”

Yancy just left. Shut the door and wired the handle shut from the outside and tried not to listen to the screaming as it started back up again. Tried not to react. Tried to block it out.

He just sat there, until it stopped.

And went back in, picked a sobbing, half-unconscious Chuck up, and tucked him into what was left of the sheets.

The engines hum and the cold air slips over the wings at subsonic speeds, twenty thousand feet below where Raleigh and Mako cut Otachi in half. Yancy resists the urge to pull out his phone and read over some of those news stories again. He’s got them all saved, little pdf files, praising his little brother for saving the world.

Saving the world.

Yancy’s so proud of him. And that shit Gipsy pulled in Hong Kong was amazing. She wouldn’t have done that if it had been the Becket Brothers back in her conn pod together. Raleigh had always provided those little creative flourishes; Yancy was the one who kept them grounded. But then, if Yancy had been there, Pentecost would have sent them out, and maybe three jaegers would have gone down in Hong Kong Harbor instead of two, and maybe everyone, the whole world, would be dead by now.

He tries not to think about this.

It’s too much guilt. Guilt and regret and rage.

Rage, because Herc knew he was alive, and Herc did not a goddamn thing to get him back in time for Pitfall. Back to his co-pilot. His...

Fuck. What are he and Raleigh to each other? 

They were still just kids the first time they kissed, after mom died and dad took off, when they were all they had left in the world. When life seemed like it would be measured in days instead of decades. When it hadn’t mattered, what had happened to the love they’d carried all their lives for each other.

He hasn’t been Raleigh’s big brother since he was twenty.

They’ve always been more.

And now, they might be nothing.

It’s been six years by now, Yancy realizes, thinking about this for the first time, cold. 

Six years.

There’s no way Raleigh...

And then the bed shifts.

Yancy pulls the earbuds out as Chuck sits down, starts untying the cheap sneakers Yancy bought for him in Lima. 

“Hey,” he says, and resists the urge to touch the kid’s back. “You know, there are other bunks. You don’t have to...”

That just gets him another snort, and the rustle of good-smelling blankets, and Chuck’s body is curling into his.

“Goodnight, Yancy Becket,” he says quietly.

Yancy clicks his phone off, flooding the small bunkroom in a breathless darkness, and strokes the kid’s hair mindlessly. “Night, Chuck Hansen.”

He just can’t figure this kid out.

Day three, Chuck woke sore and weak and hardly able to move, but for the first time, his eyes were clear and his hands didn't tremble. He was, Yancy judged, well enough to be moved, and so the ex-Ranger called the front desk. As predicted - and with the additional help of a thick roll of American twenties - the manager hadn’t batted an eye at the condition of the room, and offered to move them immediately, with fresh clothes and a complimentary lunch, on the house. 

Yancy had had to carry Chuck, but it wasn’t far, and the kid offered nothing more than a half-hearted protest, hands wrapping weakly around the older man’s neck.

He was far too light for his size.

He’d been in Lima for two, almost three, months, he’d said. 

Yancy didn’t even want to think about what he’d done in that time get himself in that kind of state.

“I’m sorry,” Chuck whispered, as Yancy set him carefully down on the lid of the toilet, and turned the water on to run him a bath. “I... I’m sorry.”

 _Sorry_ wasn’t a word that fell often from Scott Hansen’s lips, and Yancy was willing to bet it was the same for his nephew. 

“Thank you, Chuck,” he said carefully, and stood up, walking over to Chuck and tugging the disgusting hotel robe off of him - his clothes had all been ruined in the first twelve hours. “But you don’t have anything to apologize for, okay? You’re alive. You deserve to be alive. That’s all that matters.” He picked Chuck back up, and carried him the three paces over to the filling tub. “You survived. Good for you.”

And, perhaps understandably, the kid just broke down in tears.

Not knowing what else to do, just sat heavily down and ran a hand into the kid's lank, greasy hair. Stroking, soothing.

Silent.

Yancy’s still not sure who it was that was crying in the bathroom that day - if that’s who Chuck is, and the jerk-ass persona’s just some sort of cover, or if that was a fluke, and the jerk-ass is the real default. Either way, it’s not all there is to Chuck Hansen. 

Pain and arrogance.

He is both. He is neither. 

He is, in the five languages Yancy speaks, impossible to describe.

It's intriguing. 

In a way it shouldn’t be, especially after what Yancy carried him through this week. Those first few horrible days and the longer days after, where all they did was eat and sleep and walk around the hotel, trying and failing to have an actual conversation about things other than jaeger tech and combat technique, about shitty Japanese TV and shittier American soaps. 

Still.

Chuck’s intriguing. 

And while Yancy’s pretty sure that’s just because he hasn’t had anything in months, he’s worried it might be more about how Chuck looks at him. The way Chuck holds onto his arm when his body, still recovering, falters. That Chuck’s smart, and hot, and adorable in the way that Yancy likes his bed-mates adorable. 

About how the last couple of nights, Chuck’s crawled under the covers next to him, shivering, complaining of an abundance of cold and an absence of sleep, right into the place where Raleigh used to sleep.

Just like this.

It feels good to be needed. Needed the way Chuck has needed him this week.

To be a big brother again. Even if it was just for a couple of days.

“You smell good, cleaned up,” he whispers into Chuck’s hair now. 

"You're weird," Chuck grumbles.

Tight as this crappy little bunk is, he can feel every inch of the kid’s body. He’s seen him naked - and worse - half a dozen times this week, but this feels more intimate. 

Somehow.

If Yancy’s even capable of being intimate anymore. It hasn’t exactly been the Bourne Identity, the last couple of years, but living that long in the shadows, moving in the circles he’s had to move... wears on a man. There’s been nobody there, just Scott, partner and not-quite friend and a grudging hand in the darkness, but nothing more.

Nothing real.

Not that Yancy had ever had anything real.

 _What are Raleigh and I to each other?_ he wonders.

"Go to sleep, kiddo. You need it."

Chuck yawns.

Yancy doesn’t.

Just lays there in the dark until they land, Chuck’s heart beating slow and even against his own.

Yeah. _Just like a little brother, you incestuous bastard,_ the black pit of his mind whispers to him.

As they pull themselves back together - brushing their hair and gathering their shit up - Yancy catches Chuck kind of smiling at him, and he just nods back. Herc’s out there, Yancy knows, waiting for them somewhere. 

Herc.

Chuck’s family. Chuck’s real family.

Chuck’s not his.

He’s got his own brother to get back to.

Hopefully.

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

Until it isn’t.


	3. Chapter 3

Yancy half-expects Herc to try and stop him. To meet him at the tarmac and tell him _no, son, I need you to get back on that plane, I need you to help me finish this_. Like it really was one of those goddamn Jason Bourne movies, and he had some kind of super secret classified mission that somehow relied on Raleigh not knowing he was alive.

Well. 

Relied on China not knowing he was alive. China, and Australia, and Canada, and Peru, and America, and Russia, and Taiwan, and Vanatu, and the Philippines, and anywhere else that had played a part in the PPDC. 

Wasn’t like the UN was going to do shit about it. 

They were on their own. Always had been. Herc - along with Aleksis and Trevin before him - had been very clear about that.

_It’s insane, Major Gage. You can’t just stuff the genie back in the bottle._

_Like fuck we can’t. You know Oppenheimer always regretted the A-bomb, right?_

_Plenty of good’s come from nuclear power..._

_And believe me, we were about six months away from World War Three, before the kaijuu came, Yancy. Six months, generously. The Middle East would be glass right now, hundreds of millions dead in Asia, if not for those fuckers. Nobody wants to admit this, but the kaijuu have probably saved more people than they’ve killed. The oceans’ll recover. Nuclear winter, on the other hand..._

_That’s not fucking fair, sir._

_You know what’s not fair, Yancy? To go into your squadron every morning, wondering if today’s the day the world ends. If today’s the day we opt for self-extinction. This is going to work. This has to work, and I’m running out of allies._

_Sir, I get it, but I need to find..._

_Raleigh tried to kill himself three times before he finally just disappeared, Yancy. Almost succeeded the second time. You think he’s still alive? You think he didn’t just go down to the ocean and walk into it?_

_You have no fucking right to..._

_It’s what I would do._

Yancy hadn’t slept that night either.

Just spent a horrible nine hours reviewing the intel packet he’d been sent.

And called Trevin Gage in the morning.

Told him he was onboard. He’d help. As long as he could. “Just until you find my brother,” he’d said.

“You’ve got yourself, Yancy.”

Herc hasn’t honored that promise so far.

Yancy’s not expecting him to honor it now.

Even if he’s not here at the airport.

They move from the plane to a chopper, where Herc’s not waiting for him either, and the low-level nervousness that’s been grumbling in Yancy’s gut since leaving Lima, starts screaming.

Why, he’s not sure. He’s going to see Raleigh again. Shouldn’t that be a good thing?

_He won’t recognize you, he won’t want you, he’s fucking twenty-eight this year he doesn’t need you to tuck him into bed anymore, you’re not…_

Chuck pushes his fingers through Yancy’s, squeezing hard.

They’ve got headsets. They don’t talk.

The distinctive silhouette of the Hong Kong dome grows solid, in the hot haze of the Pacific night.

There’s no fanfare when they finally disembark on the helo-pad, the vast doors cracked, darkness within. Yancy briefly recalls the trip he and Raleigh took here once, after Manila, part of some press junket for the UN. It had been so alive back then. Thirty jaegers in five bays, an anthill of activity. Seeing it this quiet...

It’s disconcerting.

There are two figures there, harsh in the light wash from the half-ruined city on the other side of the bay; one human, lanky and tall, one animal, squat and fat. And it’s the animal - Max, Yancy decides, thinking about Scott’s stories and Chuck’s half-unconscious ramblings - is the first to come hauling ass towards them, and Chuck lets Yancy go, running and dropping to his knees, burying his face in wrinkly, brindled fur as the dog leaps into his arms.

Yancy slows, stops, just watching. He doesn’t want to interrupt this. Wants to remember Chuck like this, just some kid happy to see his beloved pet. Not that broken young man he found whoring himself out for drugs, and...

“Good to see you, Becket. How was the flight?”

It’s - predictably - Herc. Not quite wearing a uniform again, but Marshall stars back on the epaulettes of a mostly respectable jacket.

Yancy hooks a thumb through a belt loop. Ready for it.

“Where’s my brother?”

Herc frowns. “Yancy, you and I need to…”

“Fuck what you need,” Yancy says, flat, and crosses his arms. “I need to see him.”

“Dad,” and Chuck’s standing up, Max draped and panting happily over an arm. He’s shaking a little, and Yancy automatically reaches over to steady him. 

He’s aware of the way Herc looks at them both.

“Don’t be an arsehole,” Chuck snaps.

Herc blinks, like he’s seeing his son for the first time, and shakes his head. “Chuck, after what…”

“I’m fuckin’ hungry, old man,” the kid says quickly, cutting his father, and looks back at Yancy. 

It’s clearly not the response Herc was expecting.

And while Yancy doesn’t need the last two years of black ops work to inform his sense that something is very wrong here, he can’t bring himself to ask. 

“Sir…”

“Should be mostly empty this time of night,” Herc says grudgingly, and lays an arm around Chuck’s shoulders, pulling him forward and nodding to Yancy. Max is prancing around their heels, clearly thrilled to have his human back. Chuck’s trying to look like he’s not enjoying the contact, doesn’t need the help. It’s cute, and awkward, and suddenly, Scott Hansen makes a hell of a lot more sense. “C’mon, I’ll show you where Raleigh’s room is after we get him to the mess.”

“Dad…”

“Twenty minutes,” Herc adds, looking back at Yancy with some kind of plea in his eyes. “I promise.”

Yancy swallows the stabbing anger down, and reshoulders his bag. “I’ve heard that from you Mark I guys before,” he says, but falls into line anyway.

It’s eerie, walking through the abandoned bays and the quiet halls that look the same as they did seven years ago. Yancy’s spent more time tearing Shatterdomes apart now than he did living in them, breaking in, sneaking through, ripping into the walls and the data rooms and the labs, spoiling data, destroying prototypes, ruining DNA samples. Whatever needed to be done, he’s done. 

The Class of 2015 had been efficient, ruthless, heartless.

“One simple rule,” Trevin had told him. “One we all agreed to.”

_Nothing survives._

While Yancy had accepted that on an intellectual level, it had taken him longer to understand it.

There’d been a night, something like a year into this gig, he stood in front of a case in a tiny little room in the bowels of the Houston medical complex, staring at a fully-functional myoelectric exoskeleton. Therapeutic, its creators had told the vaguely familiar man who’d introduced himself as Doctor Donald Ressler, two weeks before. A cure for paralysis. Letting paraplegics walk, talk again. Using drift tech, combined with a stripped-down actuator system based off Tacit Ronin’s second upgrade package.

A miracle.

Something that would improve life for hundreds of people. 

But it didn’t matter.

He’d already chased this particular not-quite-patent out of Canada and Britain and across North Africa, to a Chinese PLA subsidiary, to a facility floor where fifteen-foot battle suits that would have made Tony Stark cream himself were being assembled.

Jaeger tech - born of war, born to kill - could never improve human life.

There were no benevolent applications.

There were no exceptions.

All it did was destroy.

And when the aliens were gone...

Yancy detonated the entire sub-level. 

And then he and Scott ran down the final leak from the defense contractor that had worked on Tacit Ronin’s second upgrade package, and Scott did… what he did.

“You okay, Yance?” 

Chuck. 

Far ahead of him, leaning a little more on his dad now.

His dad, who actually looks worried.

Yancy swallows, looking around at the achingly familiar hallways, wondering when he’d gone from seeing sanctuary and hope and glory in places like this, to threats and danger and broken promises.

“I’m fine,” he lies.

His feet still drag, and the Hansens are far in front of him, and there’s a turn in the hallway, and Yancy loses sight of them.

“Chuck!” he hears.

That voice... yelling like that...

That’s...

That’s the way he…

Yancy doesn’t realize he’s moving until he hits the corner and almost stumbles over his own feet at the sight in front of him.

It’s Raleigh.

On the ground, one knee down and a hand on his mouth, staring up at Chuck, who’s being held bodily back by his dad. Mako’s there, trying to help Raleigh up, that blue-tipped Japanese girl Yancy only recognizes from the news reports. Herc looks like he could kill somebody and is just trying to decide who it should be, and the whole thing could fucking matter less.

Because it’s Raleigh.

It’s Raleigh.

Yancy can’t move, can’t breath. All he can think about is waking up in that hospital in some unpronounceable town in the Kamchatka Peninsula, slowly working through his rusty high school Russian and the doctors’ terrible English to learn that Raleigh Becket was gone, Yancy Becket dead...

Almost three years ago. Not knowing if his little brother was dead or alive. Knowing he was, but not being about to touch him, talk to him, let him know _I’m here Rals, I’m still here, I’d never leave you._

All this time apart.

And here he is.

Face purpling and body tight, eyes fixed on Chuck, that weird mixture of confusion and sadness he always used to get when he was still just a boy and couldn’t understand why mom was telling him _no._ The way he looked at Yancy, the first time he tried to kiss his big brother and he was pushed away. How he is when...

_Raleigh, you promised..._

And a fist of ice twists into Yancy’s guts, freezing him solid.

Oh.

_Oh._

Yancy starts backing away, heart hammering, roaring in his ears, wondering what kind of mistake he’s made. He doesn’t belong here, this scene, these people, this place, all of these places he’s been dismantling, tearing apart, drowning all the hope they used to embody in cynical pragmatism. 

Doesn’t belong to this moment.

Which only lasts but a moment.

And then - of course, before he can retreat, fade away into the shadows as if he never was, exercise all those skills he’s spent the last few years honing to a killing edge - he’s spotted.

By that girl, Mako, he supposes.

Her eyes fall on him.

She goes white, grabs for Raleigh’s shoulder. 

Hard.

The sound his little brother makes, when he looks up at her - up at Yancy - isn’t even human.

Yancy’s not sure what he’s expecting; he’s pictured this moment a thousand times since hearing the news about Pitfall, since Scott passed him the official report that listed three survivors from the two-jaeger drop that went down to the Breach. He’s imagined Raleigh kissing him, hitting him, breaking down in tears. Big, dramatic things - sweeping, vast.

This is his brother, after all.

The only thing in the world he’s ever cared about. The center of his universe.

It’s how Yancy feels about him. 

But Raleigh doesn’t do any of that. Brow furrowed in confusion, he just lets Mako pull him to his feet, and narrows his eyes at Yancy.

“You’re not...”

“Dyed it, kid.”

Raleigh purses his lips, swallowing hard.

Yancy’s aware of the eyes on him - he can’t not be - but he can tell that Raleigh’s not, as he stands there, swaying a little in his half-laced boots, and Yancy knows that sweater the kid’s wearing. Beat up and torn as it is, he recognizes it.

One of his.

“Raleigh,” he says, pleading, stepping forward, when the silence drags on, unbearable. “Raleigh, it’s me...”

But when he finally gets a hand on his little brother’s shoulder, something in that fine body seems to collapse, and Raleigh just sighs.

Turns

And walks away.

Mako gives Yancy one curious, thoughtful look - the _stay hear_ in her expression almost audible - and bows a little.

Herc’s long let Chuck go, and Chuck’s glowering against a bulkhead, squatted down over his heels, petting his dog. 

Neither of them will look at Yancy.

Mako looks mortified, in the way Japanese people look mortified when they're pretending they aren't.

Yancy looks back over his shoulder once, at the way he came, the way back to the Shatterdome doors and everywhere that lay before this moment. 

Scrubs a hand through his his hair. 

And goes after his brother.


	4. Chapter 4

Raleigh doesn’t run.

But he doesn’t turn around.

Yancy wants to kick Herc Hansen square in the nuts. Or something else painful. Put him on his back in the Kwoon and make him scream.

But then, he hasn’t set foot in a Kwoon in years. Just the shit he and Scott get up to sometimes, when the feral bastard gets bored or...

He really doesn’t want to think about Scott Hansen right now. Or Herc. Or Chuck. Any of the Hansens.

The only thing that matters - the only thing that has ever, will ever, matter - is fleeing from him, right in front of him, and Yancy has never felt further away from anything in his life as he does his brother in this moment.

“Raleigh!” he finally yells. “Raleigh, jesus fucking... fucking stop!”

He does. Stops. Turns. Right at the top of a set of steps that probably leads to quarters or something, and Yance makes it to the bottom and doesn’t dare go any further.

Staring at his big brother like he’s a goddamn demon or something.

“You died.”

“I know.” 

“I felt...” and Raleigh clenches a fist, going back to the door, slamming the fat of his hand against it. “I felt you die.”

Yancy grimaces, wishing there - he doesn’t remember much; nothing, in fact. Just waking up in that hospital. Trevin calling. Aleksis coming up to collect him. 

“I’m sorry,” is all he can say - all he can offer, and it sounds pathetic, even to him. “I’m so sorry, Rals. I didn’t... I don’t know what happened. It’s all blank, that whole day. I... I remember...”

_I remember going to bed. I remember bringing you off in the shower, my name dancing on your lips as you came against my chest. I remember getting dinner with you at the mess, the way you smiled at me from across the table, like we were sharing a big secret, like I was the only thing in your world. But we were sharing a secret, weren’t we? Weren’t we always sharing that secret? Didn’t I hang it on you when you were sixteen, didn’t I drag you under, weren’t you drowning in..._

“... I just woke up.”

“Yancy.” And his brother squares his shoulders, like he’s making some kind of vast decision. Gestures vaguely at the room behind him. “I, umm, you wanna come in?”

Yancy finds himself smiling.

The knot in his stomach, though, doesn’t go away.

The room’s just as bare and cold as he remembers their own in Anchorage as being, one of those utilitarian interiors that mark Shatterdomes the world over. Raleigh’s sort of got it decorated - non-issue blankets on the bed, stuff scattered everywhere, an old bomber jacket laid out over the room’s only chair. And. 

Pictures.

All their pictures.

Yancy’s pulled in by that wall of photos, old, faded things, yellowing in the corners, the remnants of broken tape clinging to the edges. He recognizes them all - the trip to Amsterdam, the night of their first kill, a camping trip to the mountains, a car trip they took after dad left, no place special, nothing but the two of them.

It was never anything but the two of them back then.

It was never supposed to be anything but _them_.

Yancy was never supposed to be standing here, six years gone, unable to touch all the history they once shared, stranger instead of brother.

“Y-You don’t have any new ones,” he manages, fingertips hovering over the old pictures. “You still have that camera I got you?”

Raleigh nods towards the lockers in the corner, body closed off and eyes wary. “It’s in my bag. Never could bring myself to sell it. Not even when... you know. Who has money anyway, anymore?”

Yancy nods, gut tightening again. “You used to love photography, Rals.”

“What was there to take photos of?” Raleigh says, and settles back against the valet with its wet sink. There are flecks of shaving cream there. Like Raleigh was getting cleaned up. “Fucking Wall, you know?”

The jacket, on the chair, it’s not one of Gipsy’s.

It’s...

“Yeah, that bullshit,” Yancy sighs, thinking of some of the records he and Scott scrounged out of the UN headquarters about that. Fucking Security Council had wanted...

“Where were you, Yance?”

Raleigh looks at him, a storm gathering behind his eyes, a _stop the bullshit and answer me_ in his tone. There’s pain there, pain that never used to be, but the sweet kid Yancy remembers is still in there somewhere. Has to be. Maybe. 

Hiding.

He hopes.

“Where was I? Where you you?” Raleigh finally snaps, pushing up, arms crossed, pacing. "Where the fuck have you been?  Why... why'd you..."

"I was in a coma, Rals. I was in a coma for two, three years,” Yancy says, desperate to touch, not sure if he should, if it's even his place anymore.  The way Raleigh and Chuck were looking at each other in the hallway back there.  "I was in a coma, and when I woke up, nobody knew where you were, and..."

“Three years? Pitfall was six months ago," Raleigh says, grinding his teeth.  "You couldn't have missed that."

"Yeah, I..." And Yancy hesitates. "I was... off the grid."

“Off the grid? Off... off the fucking grid?”

That old temper - the one that Raleigh always tries so hard to quash - is coming to the surface; Yancy’s not sure whether to be relieved or worried about that. It’s the first glimpse he’s had of his little brother that seems familiar.  

"Like goddamn John Conner, Rals, come on. What the fuck do you think off the grid means?"

The old levity fails; his brother’s eyes harden to ice. "I don't know, you tell me."

"I can't."

"What do you mean, you can't?"

"I mean I can't, Raleigh.  I can't get into with you, I wasn’t exactly in a position to...”

And that, that, is when Raleigh hits him.

Too fast and too sudden to dodge.

Hard enough to knock him on his ass.

"Not in position?  Not in a fucking _position_?  The fuck, Yance?!”

Fist clenching on the cold floor, Yancy forces himself to stay down. It’s not a fucking cartel goon in front of him, but his little brother, and he’s not going to do to Raleigh what he did to Chuck the other night. 

Raleigh’s yelling now.

Ignoring him.

“I would have killed myself to get to you, if I’d known about... about this! I’d have left Marshall and the fucking PPDC and Hong Kong... the whole fucking world to burn, for you!  What the fuck was more important than...”

And, as if realizing what he’s saying, Raleigh stutters to a halt.

But Yancy still hears it.

Loud as it would be in the drift.

_What the fuck was more important than me?_

Rubbing the sore spot on his jaw, Yancy shakes his head. “No you wouldn’t, Rals.” 

“Yeah. I would have.”

What can he say?   _I wanted to, I tried, Herc wouldn't let me, not until we finished the mission?_  Who's that going to help?  How does he even begin to explain what's going on, to his brother, his innocent little brother who's always been just a bit naive about how people actually are, and...

No. Not that. Not the truth.

So he doesn't say anything.

Raleigh's face just falls further, and he folds up in that chair, head in his hands. Miserable. 

"Can't you tell me?" he asks quietly, rubbing a thumb into his temple, eyes downcast.

"You don't want to know where I've been, Rals," Yancy sighs as he sits down on the bed. He can reach the chair with his foot - it’s not far - but right now, that space might as well be the Marianas Trench. It’s fucking cold enough for it. “I don’t want to know where I’ve been.”

That jacket’s crumpled up in Raleigh’s hands now. It’s got a bulldog emblem on its shoulder, and Yancy considers the old, dirty embroidery. 

Chuck’s tattoo.  

"You can tell me."

"No, kiddo, I really can't." And despite himself, he's shoving off the floor and leaning over the chair and touching the kid's cheek.  "It'd break your heart."

"You dying broke my heart," Raleigh whispers, and his hands are on Yancy's hips now, weight, their lips scant inches apart.  "What could be worse than that?"

"I didn't die, Raleigh.”

"Yeah, you did.  You were gone and..."

"And you pulled out of it, kid," Yancy says, stroking his fingers back through Raleigh's too-long hair.  It looks good like that, but then, Raleigh always looks good.  He's got to be a narcissist or something to find his own brother so goddamn beautiful.  It's fucked up - it's always been fucked up, and Yancy thinks of Chuck.  "You pushed through it and saved the world and found a great guy and... I'm... I'm proud of you."

Raleigh blinks, lips parting a bit, body moving in as if drawn by strings.  "Yance, you... this wasn't... what guy?”

Yancy just shakes his head and moves back. “Chuck.”

“... what... what about Chuck?”

Yancy regrets the words almost instantly. He’s got no idea why Chuck Hansen was haunting a strip club in Lima - well, he knows, but primary causes and all that - but he knows what he witnessed during the kid’s withdrawal. All that pleading for Raleigh, the helpless sobbing, the screaming... they have to mean something to each other. 

Raleigh has to mean something to Chuck.

Raleigh has to be something _real_ for Chuck.

And Yancy’s wanted that for Raleigh since he was old enough to realize what it was that they were doing together. 

What it _meant_ , when Raleigh crawled into his bed in the middle of the night, seeking all the things brothers weren’t supposed to give each other.

Since he realized he couldn’t - shouldn’t - keep his little brother for himself. 

He doesn’t give voice to any of that; back then, he never knew how. Now, he hopes, he won’t have to.

Yancy’s never wanted to break his little brother’s heart. 

So maybe the time away...

“That’s his jacket, isn’t it?”

And Raleigh looks down at the old leather he’s been kneaded between his hands this whole time, and lets it fall. 

He doesn’t say anything. For a long, long moment.

“Get out.”

“Raleigh...”

“You haven’t _been_ here.”

An irrational rage floods into Yancy’s blood - because it wasn’t exactly his choice that some fucking cartel-back terrorist group stole almost seven years of research on kaijuu genetics that should have been archived and destroyed long ago, wasn’t his choice to be in the fucking Yucatan instead of in Gipsy, in the Battle of Hong Kong - but. 

_This is what you want for him, isn’t it? Somebody else in his bed, in his life. Somebody he can go to out on proper dates with and kiss in public and laugh with and have a real relationship with._

_Something real._

And under all those layers of addiction and desperation and anger, Yancy thinks he’s glimpsed a pretty good man in Chuck Hansen.

“You’re right,” he says mildly, casting back to the wall of photos. Nothing new there. Part of him wants to tear them all down. “I haven’t.”

Raleigh’s face is stony, when Yancy glances back at him, and the kid doesn’t say anything. That’s not like him at all. Not like the kid Yancy left behind, that cold Leap Year morning.

He has no idea how he should feel about any of this.

“See you in the morning? Or whenever my body thinks morning is?” Yancy says, trying to smile a little - _shared in-joke, little brother, haha_. 

“S-Sure.”

“It’s okay, we don’t have...”

“No. Breakfast. Or lunch, old man.”

The ghost of that old endearment haunts Yancy, all the way out of the room.

All the way out of the ‘dome.

He and Herc hadn’t had a chance to talk about lodging, and Yancy hadn’t really thought Raleigh would ask him to stay - or if the kid had, that he would agree to it. 

It’s okay.

Cell phone calls in the ‘dome are recorded.

A cab ride and a short walk later, Yancy finds himself a nice, nondescript bar in one of Hong Kong’s untouched business hotels. He orders himself a coffee and slips the waiter a couple bucks for a private table and plugs the encryptor unit into the small port on the back of a fresh burner phone; Hong Kong’s only surpassed by Tokyo as the prime international intelligence collection hub in the Pacific, and he’s not taking chances. 

Staring at the buttons, Raleigh’s words - _off the fucking grid, what does that mean, I would have left Hong Kong, the whole world, to burn for you_ \- echoing in his mind, Yancy wonders...

“I’ve got a lead,” Scott says, when he picks up the phone. No preamble, no greeting. 

Yancy tries not to punch the wall. “On what?”

“Big shit. Something the Phoenix Jade team was working up before she was taken down outside Tai Pei last year,” he says. Casual. Like it’s completely normal to be talking about Tai Pei. “CCP shit. Top shelf grab. _Important_ , Becket.”

 _My brother’s important_ , but Yancy doesn’t say it. “Ling Yueyin and John Chen were both Party members...”

“...and that is the result of some serious, serious manipulation of the goddamn facts by the NSA, back in ’14,” Scott interrupts smoothly. “Chen’s great-grandparents were Nationalists, and his mother was a North Korean refugee. He went to uni in goddamn Austin, Texas.”

 _Shit._ “What’s your point?”

“He was working on _something_ , Yance. Need you to get back in touch with a contact.”

“Scott...”

“Herc’s probably told him to go fuck himself. You’re far nicer. And cuter. He’ll listen to you.”

“It’s a rumor, Scott. Nobody’s been able to prove where the CCP’s tendrils have...”

“If we don’t cut this one off, everything else we’ve done has been for shit. I’ve been chasing this since Lucky. Address’ll be in the usual place. Don’t fuck me, Yance.”

The line goes dead.

Yancy sighs.

Orders himself another coffee.


	5. Chapter 5

When Yancy drags back in to the ‘Dome just past 0600, tired and cranky and still not sure where the hell he can catch some shut-eye, Herc’s waiting for him at the guard room.

Figures. 

Tenacious fucker.

Or maybe Scott called him too.

No telling with these Hansen men - _kaijuu extermination duty don’t got shit on a year running’ ops into Pakistan_ , Scott had told him, the one time Yancy had asked about why his older brother was so goddamn cagey.

And that was true, he supposed. The men and women of the jaeger corps who’d been on the covers of _Vogue_ and _GQ_ and motherfucking _Time_ had always been fictions - hardkill old school military, or new age egotistical rock stars with plasma cannon. 

Yancy’s still not sure which one he and Raleigh were.

“Breakfast, Ranger?” the Marshall asks him, gaze level.

The MP’s still on duty. Listening to every goddamn word. Yancy holds his protests firmly back behind his teeth. 

_I’m not a Ranger anymore, sir, Aleksis made that goddamn clear, and you fucking know it._

Not the best thing in the world to be saying.

“Sounds good, boss.”

The ‘Dome’s quiet, dead, but the mess is flooded with light and the scent of fried dough. Herc piles them a plate high with _youtiao_ \- oblivious to the identical tray the staff tries to offer him - and grabs a couple of mugs and a carafe, and guides them both over to a quiet table at the edge of the upper balcony.

There’s a little placard on it - four stars in line.

“Not really my spot,” Herc says, apologetic, and kicks his own chair out with one of those ridiculous Mad Max boots of his. “The staff keeps it for me, though. You know how the Chinese are about these things.”

“Rank?”

“Never wanted it, mate, and that’s the truth.”

Nodding, Yancy pours them both a coffee, and dunks one of the fried dough sticks in his own, sugar and oil swirling out across its surface. “How’s Chuck?” he asks quietly.

Herc stops, hand halfway to the coffee. His fingers curl back into his palm. “You know more about it than I do. I didn’t even know... he told me he was fine. Every time he called. He...”

“He was a fucking mess.”

“If I’d known, Yancy, I would have had you ’n Scotty tearing that city apart looking for him, and that’s the truth. You know that’s the truth.”

Yancy pulls his breakfast out before it dissolves entirely, chewing slowly, mulling that over. The Marshall looks wrecked, exhausted, like he’s been up all night playing one-man dive bar, trying to drown his guilt in a bottle of whatever’s come on the latest container ship. First spark of humanity he’s seen out of Herc in years. “What was he even doing there?”

“Lima?”

“Yeah.”

“Some trans-American NGO down there was looking to repurpose the Shatterdome, the jaeger dry docks they’ve got. Chuck got himself hired on as a consultant.” Herc looks vaguely guilty as he says it; Yancy wonders if that’s because of the drugs or because Herc knows damn well that a Class of ’15 team ripped everything useful out of those fabrication facilities when it became clear they’d never build another Mark-V. Rumor has it, it’d been that mission that broke whatever had been left to break in Scott Hansen.

There was nothing there for Chuck to play with, to flee to, there in Lima. Nothing left for Chuck anywhere. The only reason the Hong Kong 'Dome was still open - as Yancy understood it - was to buy time to figure out the decaying security situation in East Asia, to safely sequester the last critical bits of jaeger tech before World War III kicks off. Nothing left. Just show, and pretense, and lies. Hollow, shiny things.

And Chuck Hansen does not strike Yancy as the kind of guy who's interested in shiny shit that doesn't have a motor inside of it.

Yancy says so.

Herc scrubs a hand over his face. He’s definitely been drinking. “Kid wanted it bad, Yance. Wanted the fuck out of Hong Kong.”

And that, that tone in Herc’s voice, is not something he wants to engage head-on.

So Yancy dips his _youtiao_ again, and moves on. “Did you tell him?”

“If anybody could reconstitute the jaeger program anywhere, it would Chuck, in that place.”

 _So you send your only son to halfway across the planet to get hooked on smack for this little crusade of yours?_ Yancy wants to say, but holds it in. Herc’s a cagey fucker under normal circumstances; whatever’s going on here, it’s bad. “Chuck wasn’t involved.”

“Six years in the drift, Yance. We’ve no secrets left.”

“So Chuck knows?”

“Chuck knows enough to know better than to ask questions about...”

“About what?”

Yancy looks up, to the source of that voice, and freezes. 

Because there’s the kid, standing there behind Herc with a bowl of granola and packet of eagle-branded UHT milk, looking like hell warmed over.

And of course, the first thing out of Yancy’s mouth is.

“They’re still making that PPDC shit, kiddo?”

+++++

For six years, Raleigh has run on one single truth; his brother was dead, taken by the kaijuu, ripped from his very soul while they were still in the drift.

That was all Raleigh had been able to think about last night, laying sleepless in his bunk, hating himself.

Nobody had told him.

And yet, people knew.

Raleigh stares at his older brother now, not sure what the fuck he’s supposed to do with that little bit of levity - with the fact that his older brother’s eating and chatting with Herc like they’re old friends. It reminds him of Manila, and the way Scott hadn’t even bothered flirting with either of them, how Herc had tried to haul him off and Yancy had jerked him back and...

Nobody had told him.

Nobody had _told him_.

Nobody had told him, and Herc had known.

Herc _knew_.

This whole goddamn time, Herc had...

Raleigh can hear his heart - loud, quickening - in his ears.

He takes a deep breath.

He can’t lose his temper again. Not like he did last night, letting that tension in his chest snap 

“Umm, yeah. I guess? It’s...” and he looks behind, at where he just came from, like there are answers back there in the fridges. “It’s what we have, I don’t know.”

“Pentecost laid supplies in for a year, when the news came down,” Herc tells Yancy in hat quiet way of his, like he spoke that first day over dinner. Except now it’s Raleigh he’s not engaging with, instead of Chuck. “Dome’s pretty well stocked.”

“Oh yeah. His resistance bullshit. Scott told me about that. Was he ever...”

“He never wanted to know, mate. Thought it was what killed Tamsin, the run she did on a…”

Raleigh doesn’t realize he’s squeezing the UHT carton.

Until it explodes.

Cold milk splatters out everywhere, soaking Raleigh’s pants and sweater, splashing across the table and Herc’s back. The Marshall doesn’t react, except to turn around and sort of look at Raleigh.

Like he finally realized that he’s there.

And the casual dismissal of the little acknowledge nearly undoes Raleigh again.

“You need something, Ranger?”

Raleigh tries to form words, put some kind of sense into the raw glacier-burst of emotion coursing through him right now, but all he ends up doing is baring his teeth. Breathing hard. Trying to keep himself rooted. He can’t just...

Herc stares levelly back.

Yancy makes a little noise in the back of his throat, and plucks another piece of _youtiao_ off the tray. “Raleigh?” 

But Raleigh can’t look at his brother right now.

He spent the whole night awake, unable to sleep, out of his mind with worry about what he’d said, how he’d reacted when Yancy had just been trying to be the big brother he always was, where Yancy was, what Yancy was doing, where Yancy was sleeping, how Yancy was alive, how he was _alive_ , how he was…

He sets the bowl of cereal he was carrying away on another nearby table, and leans into theirs.

“You apologized to me,” he growls, fingernails digging into the laminate surface. “You shook my hand and told me you were _sorry about my brother._ Did you fucking know he was alive then?”

Yancy doesn’t flinch, but Raleigh can hear him inhale. Hard.

Herc just goes even flatter on him. More neutral. If that’s possible. “I’d appreciate if you rephrased that last statement, Becket. Minus the cursing.”

Raleigh’s face contort. “Excuse me, Marshall, sir. You shook my hand when I arrived on station, you expressed your condolences for my brother’s demise, and you lied to my fucking face.”

“I was lying to Stacker, not you,” Herc replies in that low, dangerously calm voice of his, and sips at his coffee. “And afterward... well, you know.”

Raleigh crosses his arms. Lima? That had not been his idea. That had been the opposite of his idea, actually. If he’d only… if he could have… 

But Yancy’s looking at him now, and Raleigh wonders if there’s any drift leave between them, enough of a ghost to carry his thoughts to that space that once existed within them both.

Home.

Because despite everything that might have happened with Chuck, Yancy is, will always be, his home.

Chuck was never supposed to be anything more than a quick fuck. A good time. Some stress relief. A little recreation.

Chuck _isn't_.

“Chuck made his own decisions, sir.”

“Spoken like a man truly comfortable with hitting _send _on that Wednesday night text,” Herc says, colder than Raleigh has ever heard him, and stands, coffee in hand. “Yancy, thank you for the company. We’ll talk later.”__

__“Yes sir,” Yancy says absently, eyes still on Raleigh. “Umm, Marshall, could we...”_ _

__“You don’t have to leave,” Raleigh blurts out - he couldn’t eat right now anyway. “I… I was gonna go see if I could find Chuck. He wasn’t in his room and…”_ _

__“No dice, Becket.” Herc sips at his coffee again. “I had you taken off the visitation list.”_ _

__“What do you mean, the visitation list?”_ _

__“He’s at the clinic.”_ _

__And a million scenarios race through Raleigh’s mind at the same time; Chuck got sick, Chuck got hurt, Chuck was out alone drinking and some fucking kaijuu cultist recognized him, Chuck was..._ _

__“Am I on the list, Herc?”_ _

__Yancy. Drinking his coffee like it’s water and they’re all in the middle of the Sahara._ _

__Herc frowns. “Yeah, but...”_ _

__“Then I’m going to the clinic,” he says, and stands, grabbing another couple _youtiao_ and his coffee as he does so. “C’mon, Rals. Let’s go say good morning to your guy.”_ _

__Raleigh can feel Herc’s eyes on him. All the way out of the mess._ _

__Fuck._ _

__This whole thing, just... fuck._ _

__Yancy’s quiet as they traverse the corridors. It’s a rabbit warren in here, a mess of bad Chinese signage and weird curves, determined by the fuel lines and electrical conduit behind the walls. It’s taken Raleigh months to learn it all, but despite the fact they hardly spent any time here in Hong Kong together, pre-Knifehead, Yancy moves like he knows exactly where he’s going._ _

__He’s different, his older brother. His hair, his stance, his stride, is all different. Not how Raleigh remembers it at all._ _

__And his eyes..._ _

__“So, where’d you find Chuck?” Raleigh asks, trying to keep his voice even._ _

__Yancy doesn’t turn around. “Are you two dating? Hooking up? Whatever the term is that the kiddies are using these days?”_ _

__Raleigh’s cheek flare with humiliated heat. “N-No. Of course not. You’re...”_ _

__“I was dead.” Flat. Unemotional. Like there’s not five - six - years of pain wrapped up in that one little… whatever the fuck any of this is. Concept. Truth. _Lie_. “You can’t have mourned me forever.”_ _

__But there’s no time to scream, to rage - he’s half-running to keep up with Yancy’s strides now. “You were my brother, Yance, of course I fucking... how’d you even talk Chuck back here? He left, swearing he’d never come back.”_ _

__“How’d I talk him…” and Yancy doesn’t look back. “I didn’t give him a goddamn choice, Rals. I called Herc and I stuffed his ass on a plane and brought him home.”_ _

__Raleigh clenches his jaw and picks up his pace. Yancy had Herc’s number. Of course he did. What the hell was going on here? “Right. Because Chuck was... was sick or something, right?”_ _

__Yancy stops. Pulls up short. Turns. Lays a hand on Raleigh’s chest. A strange expression on his face. “What happened?”_ _

__Raleigh jerks back. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”_ _

__His brother is quiet for a moment, and then closes his eyes, leaning on the wall with one arm. “I was dead, Raleigh, and as far as anybody knew, so were you. I thought I’d do some good with that.”_ _

__“I don’t...”_ _

__Yancy shakes his head, opens his eyes, gaze fixing back on Raleigh. “So. You were saying. You and Chuck.”_ _

__“Chuck?”_ _

__“Yeah. Chuck.”_ _

__“Nothing,” Raleigh lies - because he is not sharing this story, he can’t risk sharing this story. Not with his brother, and not when he already fucked everything up last night by freaking out about this, and… and he can’t._ _

__“It was nothing. I fucked him a couple of times. You used to do that, remember, fuck around on me, when you thought I wasn’t looking? Like you did with Nao...”_ _

__And Yancy’s got him by the throat, slammed him into the wall, before Raleigh can even finish the word. His chest spasms, steely-strong fingers digging hard into his artery, a calloused palm driving into his windpipe._ _

__Shocked, eyes watering, Raleigh squirms helplessly, unable to budge, and he doesn’t understand - he _doesn’t_ \- where in the hell any of this is coming from. _ _

__But almost before he can gasp out a _Yancy, please_ , those fingers open and his brother’s arms catch him as he stumbles forward. _ _

__For a moment - his eyes closed, breathing ragged - Yancy feels the same to Raleigh as he always has. Same strong arms, same musky scent, same gentle voice, holding him safe from everything bad in the world._ _

__Has? Had?_ _

__This man who’s holding him can’t be his brother._ _

__Yancy… Yancy would have never…_ _

__But there’s a hand on his cheek, stroking slowly across the stubble Raleigh hasn’t bothered to shave in almost a week, and the first touch of his brother’s fingers to his hair undo him completely._ _

__Yancy always used to touch him like that. Even back when they were just kids, and the only reason he crawled into Yancy’s bed was to make the nightmares go away._ _

__Yancy always makes the nightmares go away._ _

__And now, here, this moment, for the first time in six years, Raleigh can breathe…_ _

__“Yeah, I fucked around, but I… and you, and… you were never that kind of guy, Rals. The fuck happened?”_ _

__…and just as quickly, it all locks up again._ _

__Six years. Six years, and all that time, Yancy was alive. Six months he’s been here, under Herc’s command, the man who Yancy has had on fucking speed dial, and not once did Yancy… no, Yancy would have called, Herc wouldn’t let him, Herc could have said something, Herc could have told him, back, back before, before he and Chuck…_ _

___…you betrayed him…_ _ _

__He gasps, and pushes out of that embrace he thought he’d never feel again. Stumbles. Back. Flees._ _

__“Raleigh?” Yancy asks, worry in his voice now, and Raleigh could almost laugh, to hear it._ _

__Laugh. Or start crying._ _

__All this time - all this time with Chuck motherfucking Hansen - and Yancy’s been alive._ _

__Raleigh can’t look at his brother. Or Chuck. Or anyone, right now._ _

__He can’t._ _

__Yancy’s yelling at him now, further and further away down the hall, as Raleigh blindly flees to the safety of his own room._ _

__He barely makes it inside before that throbbing in his skull turns into a full-on roar, and he can’t keep himself on his feet. Raleigh collapses back into a rumpled, unkempt bed, staring at a wall of photos from a life he can barely remember._ _

__It was over. It was supposed to be over. All of this._ _

__He was supposed to be done._ _

__He and Chuck were supposed to have a chance._ _

__And Raleigh, fingering the rising bruise on his neck, hates himself for even thinking it._ _

__Yancy’s alive._ _

__Yancy’s here._ _

__That’s all that matters._ _

__That’s all that’s ever mattered._ _


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I realize there are a lot of little plot threads and questions hanging out there. I ask that you trust me to fix those, before the fic is up - I'll get to them all, or at least, the ones that need getting to, promise!
> 
> Also, everyone in this story is an adult, with full mental capacity; they're all making their own decisions, no matter how painful those decisions might be. I ask that you trust me to work them through those, too. ;p
> 
> You're all awesome.

The usual place.

The usual place.

Physical dead drops are hard to work, with what he and Scott have been doing. Too few people, too much geographical area to cover, too much risk of exposure. They’ve got a tunnel network instead, top generation shit - Scott’s told him a dozen stories about where it came from, how it works, but Yancy’s never had much of a head for quantum computing, and Hermann Gottlieb’s report on the subject gives him hives. 

He knows how it works. 

What he has to do.

Secondary lab, on the lower levels, in every ‘Dome around the Pacific. Back in the server room, fifth row, second rack. Pull out the keyboard, shove his hand in the capillary reader. Initializes off the first reading, then takes a DNA sample - he winces as the single use needle slides between his fingers - then generates the second half of a forty-eight digit PIN off that.

Takes fives minutes for the system to spool up.

There’s no printer. No external ports of any kind. The DNA print initiates some kind of hard connection inside the machine, and up it links. Not to _the_ satellite, but one of many.

Romeo Blue spent a couple months’ worth of training runs, back in early 2017, cutting every transpacific cable in service, and the US never rebuilt them, citing the probability of kaijuu attacks. Handily isolating itself from East Asia. Internet’s been fucked ever since, especially in China, millions of terabytes of data forced through Central Asian landlines and across satellite networks instead.

For this.

For this address, blinking at him from the screen in little green letters that belong in a goddamn Michael Bay movie.

Or John Woo.

_Fong and Tull_

_Bone Slums_

Yancy blinks, and it’s gone. Right on cue.

He slides his hand out.

Leaves the lab.

It can wait.

A few hours at least.

He’ so lost in thought - what it is, what Scott’s found, if they can finally end this - that it’s almost a shock, that a slobbery bulldog meets Yancy at the door to the little clinic suite.

He’s heard plenty about this little dude over the years, after all, and from what he understands, Chuck’s never without him. _When he’s at home_ , he adds to himself, and drops to a knee.

“You must be Max,” he says, holding out a hand while the dog sniffs him. “Huh?”

“Oi, ’s my dog.”

Chuck. In the doorway of what must be the bathroom, in a worn-out uniform undershirt and boxers of indeterminate color - gray, maybe, or purple. He’s got a hospital robe on. He looks a little less like hell warmed over.

His hair is a disaster.

He’s smiling.

Nice change.

“Yeah, umm, I know,” Yancy begins and shifts his weight back. _Scott has a photo of you two in his wallet, back when your dad gave him to you_. Probably not the best thing to say. “I’ve seen the news and shit, you know?”

“Yeah,” and it sounds sad. 

“You doing okay?”

“They wanna keep me for a while.” Chuck rubs at a gauze that’s taped over his arm, and Yancy wonders how many vials of blood that represents. “Today, I think.” His voice drops. “They’re bringing in a head-doc. Some cunt who’s gonna force me into some program somewhere.”

Yancy just keeps petting Max, who’s got a blissed-out expression on his wrinkled face. “If it would help…”

“What would help would be a bloody jaeger, mate!” Chuck explodes, and pitches a little, grabbing for the door jamb as his equilibrium swings dangerously off. Yancy’s at his side in a second, wrapping an arm around his waist and pulling him back to the bed. Chuck’s fingers twist into his shirt. “Lemme go.”

“And let you smash that…” Yancy barely stops himself from saying _pretty_ “ugly mug of yours straight into the floor?”

Chuck doesn’t let go. “Fucking hate this.”

“Chuck, where you were…”

“Never wanted the goddamn drugs,” Chuck grumbles into his shirt. “Fucking hate the way they made me feel. Fucking hate this, but…”

Yancy takes a chance, absently stroking Chuck’s hair. “You wanted to forget. Raleigh. You wanted to forget Raleigh.”

Chuck grumbles again but doesn’t even try to deny it. “Your brother’s an arsehole, mate.”

Yancy forces himself not to react. “What happened?”

“I dunno,” Chuck says in a tone that is very clearly a lie, and turns up to look at him. “Doesn’t matter anymore. I’m over it.”

And Yancy’s about to tell him _no you’re not it’s okay he’s a hard guy to forget who could ever be like Raleigh?_

When Chuck surges up and slings a leg over his hip and kisses him.

+++++

Raleigh’s still a mess, when Mako comes by. In her pencil skirt and her lace shell, the uniform she’s defined for herself as a civilian and a woman and a Japanese woman at that helping defend a Shatterdome being run by an Australian in an old British protectorate against a very angry China, Mako comes by.

And goes white, when Raleigh tells her what’s happened.

She doesn’t get angry, though. Doesn’t yell, doesn’t emote much at all. Reserved, Mako is, Mako has always been, and the angry girl who’d screamed at Otachi from fifty thousand feet has long been replaced by a subdued woman who doesn’t really have a place in the world, who feels like her purpose is served and does not know now what to do with herself. No ties, no direction, except the sense of duty and shared suffering that binds her to the people around her.

Raleigh wishes he could make her happy. But he can’t give her what she needs.

And she knows that - she’s been in his head, she’s seen what he is, who his heart belongs to. 

He loves her. But he doesn’t love her like Pentecost did. Like some other, luckier, man one day will. He doesn’t love her like she needs.

She says she’s okay with that. That she understands. That _I would never take you from the memory of him, Raleigh._

She’s been talking about going home. Back to Tanegashima. Help them rebuild. But she’s like Raleigh; she won’t leave Herc. 

“But he died. I felt... you felt him die.”

“Had to be his panic, or fear, or something. He’s alive, Mako, he’s alive and he’s here and...”

She doesn’t offer an opinion. No words of wisdom - although Raleigh knows she has them. _You must let the ghosts rest_ , she told him once, telling him the stories about the harvest festivals and dances and the mist under the boughs of ancient cedars to the south of where she was raised.

“... and Chuck is too,” she says quietly, squeezing his hand. “Chuck came home.”

“Yancy brought him back from Lima,” Raleigh says, and squeezes back.

_I don’t know what to do._

Chuck Hansen was never supposed to be anything.

Was never supposed to mean anything.

None of this shit should have happened.

The first time they’d fucked, it was a week after Pitfall and Raleigh couldn’t stand it any longer. The world was saved; he hadn’t died. Mako hadn’t died; he’d saved his co-pilot. He’d saved her, even if he hadn’t saved Pentecost, but he’d saved himself and the world media was going fucking crazy over all of it and Yancy was still dead and everything was _wrong_.

Raleigh had imagined, maybe, it could all be over.

He still doesn’t know why he got in that goddamn escape pod.

He was done.

And then he wasn’t.

So he fucked Chuck Hansen.

It wasn’t like it was something he’d planned. They were out again - IDs left behind at the guard shack, any trace of uniform left back in their rooms - taking in the endless party that had engulfed the streets of Hong Kong. Out. Drinking. Slamming shots of something claiming to be kiajuu blood. Maybe smoking a little bit of hash - who knew, didn’t matter, none of it mattered, because at some point in that night Raleigh came to his senses with Chuck’s knee between his legs and Chuck’s tongue in his mouth and it had just been too fucking long.

Chuck should have been dead.

Raleigh should have been, too.

Instead, they were ripping each other's clothes off in Raleigh's room at the 'Dome.

Where the pictures of Yancy still hung on the wall.

He hadn’t _been_ with anyone since his brother died, the memory of their last night together too sharp and too beautiful to dull with the memories of anyone else. There’d been blow jobs and hand jobs and random shit like that, but it didn’t count - always furtive and dark, in back closets and filthy bathrooms and purely, purely physical, more mutual masturbation than anything else, Yancy’s name in his teeth as he came.

Wasn’t like that with Chuck.

With Chuck, it was different.

It was hot skin and cool teeth, was flushed smiles and bared growls, was heat and violence and come smeared across heaving bellies and the soft kneading of fingertips, of a soft nose pressed to his shoulder and whispered entreaties of _don’t go you don’t have to go._

It was... 

Strange.

Raleigh had made the mistake of letting himself fall asleep there, briefs around his ankle, sprawled out in Chuck’s narrow little barracks bed. He’d woken up spooned up around the infuriating ginger brat, with Max snoring on top of them, and somehow, for a moment, he forgot about everything else.

He forgot about Yancy.

He forgot how his happiness was supposed to be gone.

But when Chuck had woken up, stretched out, rolled over - an awed little “you’re still here, mate?” whispered into the warmth of the space between them - Raleigh had remembered.

Never in his life had he gotten dressed so goddamn fast.

But it didn’t stop him from coming back that night - after he’d locked himself in his room, after he’d tried and failed to drown his failure in the bottle of a bottle of cheap vodka, after he’d touched one of the photos on the wall and remembered the night they’d drug into Amsterdam on the late train and Yancy had led him down a strange little street to a gorgeous hotel foyer and told him he’d gotten them the best suite in the place and they’d barely left the truly excellent bed for the next two days.

It didn’t stop him from banging on Chuck’s door, hating himself, hating his brother for dying, hating the kaijuu for killing the only thing he’d ever loved, ever _would_ love.

Didn’t stop him from shutting all of Chuck’s protests up with a hard, hot kiss.

“Strip,” he’d ordered, desperate to touch something that wasn’t the past. “Fucking naked, right now.”

“Oi, I’m not...”

“Do you or do you not like dick up your ass?”

“You’re pissed, mate, don’t give me that shit ‘bout not bein’ able to smell it, I can see it in your...”

And Raleigh had been sweating; Chuck had stopped.

Laid a hand on his chest.

Looked at him, with an expression, in a way, that the hero of Pitfall, darling of the jaeger corps, son of Herc Hansen, shouldn’t have been capable of.

“You want me, or you want him?”

Raleigh had torn him damn near apart for that.

Chuck gave as good as he got.

And the next night, Chuck came by his room with a smirk and a fresh bottle of - better - vodka - and they did it again.

And the next.

Until things _shifted_ , into something far more dangerous, and he’d...

“Stop.”

Mako.

Squeezing his hand.

He smiles back at her.

He could shatter apart at any moment.

They both could. 

That was the price Pitfall had taken on both of them. On all three of them.

Surviving something none of them had really wanted to survive...

“You hearing any of that?”

“Nng, _so desu_...” she says, more noise than word, and nods, staying with English after all. “Not so... not so much, Raleigh. But I do not need the drift to know what you are thinking about.”

“Yancy?”

“Chuck.”

“Mako, Chuck and I, all that...”

“Have you even been to see him yet?”

He eyes her. She’s ghosting. How is she ghosting? Last time they were hooked in was almost five months ago, last drift on the test Pons before goddamn Gottlieb quarantined the equipment.

Or maybe she just knows, like she knows everything else. Like she knows he doesn’t want to hear anything more about this. 

She just lays her head on his shoulder, an arm around his waist, a comforting presence against discomforting thoughts.

Chief among them, if he’s not betraying his brother like this, with her. Too.

+++++

For an insane moment, Yancy lets Chuck do it.

Lets Chuck have it all. The warmth, the strength, his hands hard on his hips and their teeth clashing as they search for a better angle. The sensation that’s flowing between them like electricity. The sheer unfounded insane _goodness_ of it all...

Before shoving him off.

Staring at him.

Breathing hard.

Panicked.

Because that... that was...

That was his brother’s boyfriend.

“I’ve got an appointment,” he says.

Yancy leaves Chuck there, like that, curled up around the wrinkled, brindled body of his dog. The kid doesn’t protest. Doesn’t even look up.

But Yancy can feel those eyes on him, the entire way out. To the ruined temple of Reckoner's bones, and the greasy wares of one of...

Huh.

Scott hadn't mentioned this bit.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for this fic. Really. It's disjointed and long in between updates, and... yeah. Sometimes things just get away from you, you know?

This was the last place, the last person, Yancy Becket expected to find himself sitting in and staring at.

And despite the fact that everything’s gone to hell - dust on the stone, slime in the tanks, an ashen blue tinge to the man’s skin that means only thing, only ever one thing - he’d trying his best not to show.

Take it in stride.

“So. What do you have for me?”

“A back door. Completely secure, one hundred percent hidden. Straight into the PLA’s top classified network. Chinks don’t know a goddamn thing about it.”

“Nobody’s ever gotten that close...”

“One of _my_ lieutenants used to be one of _their_ lieutenants, Becket.” And the man on the other side of the polished marble table pauses, nodding. “And my computer guy used to work for Google.”

“And you’re a fucking ex-CIA man who came over here with Blackwater’s traitor CEO. Why should I listen to a goddamn thing you say?”

Hannibal Chau - or according to the dossier Scott has on him, Kevin Bennick, native of Queens, New York City, by way of Panama, Paris, North Africa, Afghanistan, and South Korea - just smiles at him. 

“Why do you think we put him in the region?” Teeth bared, that expression’s more menace than reassurance. “We all knew from the beginning this Pax Kaiju bullshit wouldn’t last. If we made it through the war, we needed to be positioned to win the next one.”

Yancy shakes his head. “This isn’t about favoring one nation’s security over...”

“Bullshit it’s not. You want the States to win, just as much as I do.”

“We aren’t giving this tech to America,” Yancy says, blunt and hard - he hadn’t believed it himself, for the longest time, until he’d sat down with Hermann and their local contact in Alice Springs and made them go over the procedure three or four times. “We aren’t giving this tech to anybody.”

“So I’ve heard,” Chau replies with a nod. “And that’s probably noble of you, if it holds.”

“It’ll hold,” Yancy says, and he knows how he must sound; a little boy insisting that Santa Clause is real.

He has his doubts, after all.

They’ve all had their doubts.

Doubts that led good men like Stacker to turn their backs on the whole thing. Denounce it. Condemn it.

Chau’s quiet for a moment. 

“I’ve been in the region for almost twenty years,” he says, and the teasing sarcasm is gone from his voice. “Won’t be able to keep my eye on it much longer. If you boys can pick up the slack on this, I’d appreciate it.”

Yancy frowns, licking his lip. “On what?”

“The PLAAF downloaded everything on the Shatterdome mainframe a week before the Mark V program was cancelled. Everything. They got everything, Becket. Right down to Pentecost’s photos of baby Mori.”

“How the fuck do you...” and the enormity of what Chau’s saying manages to overcome the fact that the bastard knows his name. And he falls back, heavy in the chair, hand over his face. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Everything we’ve...”

“You think the US can get into Australia faster than the Chinese can? You really imagine that those fucking Communist bastards can’t get your insurance to talk?” Chau snorts. “You think the Australians’ll protect ‘em?”

“That’s not...”

“Life’s not.” And Chau grimaces, face spasming a little before settling back into that easy, predatory grin. “So whaddaya say, junior? Want the access codes?”

He shakes his head, trying to recall everything Scott’s told him about this guy, everything he’s learned in his three years of brushing against the kaijuu black market, the mobsters from Chau’s organization he’s encountered, both high and low on the totem pole. There’s only ever been consensus on two things; that the man is ruthless, and that he doesn’t do anything for free, for anyone. 

Not even the Class of ’15.

Not even after Herc threw him exclusive rights to the kaijuu falls.

“What do you get out of it?”

“Hong Kong.”

“The fuck you want Hong Kong for?”

“I’ve got some plans. Better than what the mainland has planned for it.”

Yancy shakes his head, and pushed the tablet back over to him. “I can’t just trade you an island. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

That smile just becomes more predatory. “If you wanna verify what I’m telling you, get your resident geek on it. The program’s clean” He tosses Yancy a thumb drive. “But don’t take too long.”

“Only so much kaijuu bone powder left to sell, huh?”

“For you, sweetcheeks, I’ll give you your first ounce free.”

+++++

Last person in the world Chuck wants to deal with is Raleigh Becket.

So he doesn’t.

Medical clears him around noon, just in time to duck out and grab lunch at the secondary mess, the one that operates down in the bay.

Or operated, rather.

It’s closed now - hadn’t been, before Chuck went to Lima, and it occurs to him, staring at the shuttered metal front of what used to be the shift crew mess, just how long he’s been away.

Months. Fuck. 

Doesn’t even remember half of it.

Doesn’t even remember what he was taking.

But he does remember why he was doing it.

This.

All of this.

Max whines by his side, and Chuck sits down slowly, petting his dog absently, lost in thought.

“At least you still love me, boy,” he murmurs.

Max lays his chin on Chuck’s knee.

The space where his jaeger once stood is empty, her harnesses vacant, the space she filled negative and dark. Gone is the bustle, the importance, the sheer peace of knowing that what you were doing mattered. 

It’s all gone. The jaegers. The kaijuu. The purpose in his life. Chuck hadn’t realized how hard it would be, trying to adjust to the world after the war. Almost everyone had lost someone. Almost no one had done anything about it. The world had no use for him anymore, some fucked-up kid whose skill set rested entirely in technology that would never exist again - dad had seen to that.

 _Taken the jaegers from me,_ Chuck thinks, bitterness lancing through his heart, _just like mum._

The lack of Striker aches. The lack of dad’s mind, brushing his own, reassuring him that no matter how fucked up the world’s become, everything’s going to be okay. Uncle Scott’s laughter. Mum’s smile and the way her hair smelled when she swept him up after school to call him a big boy and tell him how proud she was of...

He never should have fucked Raleigh Becket.

And not just because the Raleigh Becket who came back from the Wall wasn’t the Raleigh Becket who’d graced the pull-out centerfold from that old GQ article, _Anatomy of American Hero._ That Raleigh had been an ideal, the PPDC’s golden boy, standing proud in his white drivesuit, brother at his side, a grin on his face like the world was his. That Raleigh had never existed - Chuck was man enough to admit that to himself. 

But there had been a Raleigh Becket who’d walked into a studio that day, given his quotes on another, gave the whole world - including one little Aussie boy who didn’t know what to do with all the rage building up inside of him - hope.

There had been a Raleigh Becket who’d been worthy of that man beside him. The man who’d pulled Chuck out of his own despair and held him in the night and told him everything was going to be fine.

Chuck closes his eyes, and leans back against one of the massive pylons.

Tries not to think about how badly he wants a hit.

He never should have let Raleigh fuck him.

Hell, he didn’t even know if he liked boys. Or girls. Or whatever. Dad doesn’t either - not anymore, old man had drifted with too many people over the years, picked up little bits and pieces of everyone else, and passed them right along, like goddamn gonorrhea. 

Fifteen... fuck. Chuck had never so much as kissed anyone before that. 

Dad might have been good at locking his memories down, but he hadn’t been good enough to shut them all off.

Almost all Chuck’s sexual experience was second- and third-hand. Fucking prostitutes in Thailand. Rushed handjobs while the baby was asleep. Barracks shenanigans. A shower rape - and Chuck hadn’t asked where that one had come from, and dad had never volunteered.

The only real experience he’d ever really had, really, were the couple of post-kill fucks he and Herc had had. They’d never talked about those, either - it was part of being a pilot, everyone understood, there were no condemnations, there was no guilt.

Chuck had enjoyed it at the time.

Those memories are still curiously untinged by regret.

At least dad loved him.

Raleigh, on the other hand...

_Do you or do you not like dick up your ass?_

Sex with dad had never been like that. Or maybe, it had been exactly like that - rough, almost vicious, nothing but sheer need driving them both on. 

But while dad normally feigned sleep after, an excuse to stay curled around Chuck for the night, while Chuck normally feigned sleep in the morning, an excuse to stay wrapped in dad’s arms as a gentle kiss or two was placed on his forehead, not even the illusion of tenderness had been present that night with Raleigh.

That first night.

Anyway.

Until things had...

Fuck.

He’d been such an idiot, thinking Raleigh might have actually wanted him for _him_ , not as some replacement for his brother - and yeah, Chuck had heard those rumors, everyone had heard those rumors, everyone had known.

Not everyone had heard Raleigh moan out his brother’s name in the middle of the night, nor grabbed him and kissed him hard enough to bruise and told him _just get it out of your system, mate, fucking say it_ in the middle of things.

But even that - the way Raleigh had shuddered, teared up, shaken his head but moaned out _Yancy_ anyway - Chuck could have forgiven.

Accepted.

If that was all he was going to get... well, it was better than what came.

What happened to him. What happened to them.

Somewhere around the fifth or sixth time they’d found themselves tangled in bed together, finished, come and sweat cooling on their skin. Raleigh whispering _I should go_ and Chuck nodding back _I know mate_.

Raleigh staying anyway.

All night.

Sleeping long enough for Chuck to wake before him in the morning.

To realize...

There was no judgment in the jaeger corps.

No condemnation.

Chuck wonders, now, if that’s why Yancy had been so patient with him in Lima. If Yancy had just _understood_. If that’s why Yancy is so comfortable, like a worn-out shirt that fits perfectly, the age and wear only making it that much better to wrap up in. 

Yancy’s Raleigh’s better half. Older, calmer, gentler and more forceful at the same time.

Like everything Raleigh did to him was a pale imitation of what Yancy must have once, long ago, done to Raleigh.

The two of them, fitting into each other’s 

But that’s just the problem.

Yancy is Raleigh’s.

And Raleigh was only using him, Chuck Hansen, as a replacement for that.

Those two... fucking soulmates, or some shit like that.

There’s no place for him in any of that. 

Even if he was stupid enough to have - somewhere between pinning that GQ spread to his wall as a kid and waking him up with the first blowjob he’d ever given, messy and imprecise and his tiny Shatterdome quarters full of Raleigh’s laughter, the first time Chuck had ever heard it - fallen in love with the younger Becket brother.

Even if he’d stayed awake on the plane ride from Fiji, tucked securely under Yancy’s arm, listening to Yancy’s soft snoring, wondering if what he felt stirring in his gut, hot and bright and glowing like the sun, wasn’t much the same thing.

It’s not fucking fair.

There’s nothing to eat in the bays; nothing but bad memories and Max pawing at his leg, whining, wanting to know why his human in upset. So Chuck pets his dog and tells him _it’s all okay, boy_ and leaves, heart heavy and arms cold, for the regular mess.

Where, if there is any justice in the world, Raleigh Becket won’t be.

Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. Chuck doesn’t bother to check. He just piles a tray with whatever looks good and tucks himself away at dad’s table up top and eats mechanically, eyes on the TV screens that grace the upper deck.

The BBC again; funding ran out for the PPDN a long time ago.

And Herc never liked those bastards anyway.

Five minutes in, a special report breaks.

Lima is burning.

Explosion at the Shatterdome. One of the old fuel reserves exploded. JP-8, flaming through the entire facility. 

Hot enough to melt steel.

The authorities aren’t even trying to put it out.

There won’t be anything left but slag.

Fucking Scott, Chuck thinks, and digs back into his lo mein.

No good memories there, either.

+++++

The old J-Tech levels are something out of an SCP file now, half lit and equipment shredded out of the walls, the scent of kaijuu blood still clinging to the concrete surfaces and the sounds of old drift experiments still lingering in the still air.

“We had to strip the place a few months ago. Even with the door codes changed, a few pieces have escaped onto the black market...”

“I do apologize for the mess, Ranger Becket...”

“It’s just Becket. Not a Ranger anymore,” Yancy replies automatically, and steps over a mess of burnt-out Cat 6. 

Herc, striding along next to him, shrugs - Yancy’s first stop on his way back into the ‘Dome had been the Marshall’s office. The second had been Gottlieb’s lab. “Chau’s on contract to seize anything that makes its way onto the black market. So far, we’ve recovered most of it.”

“But we still don’t know what’s been reverse-engineered,” Gottlieb adds. “I’ve had the lads down in Alice work up some additional code. Nothing can hit the Internet without us finding it.”

“Unless it’s behind the Great Firewall of China, right?” Yancy asks.

The German-British scientist waggles the thumb drive over his shoulder. “If Chau’s not lying, this should grant us access.”

“He said it’s PLA tech.”

“PLA owns the Internet in this part of the world.” 

They reach an innocuous metal door, and Herc lays his thumb on the reader, punches a twenty-four digit code into the pad. Gottlieb watches their commander with something like longing in his eyes; Yancy wonders when Herc let him in here last.

“It has been quite the challenge, let me assure you,” he says, looking away from Herc as the door swings inward. A wave of cold air hits them, a dark room yawning open. “Nitrogen cooled. I apologize for the temperature, but the equipment has a very low tolerance for variance. Couldn’t risk decoherence.” 

Herc nods. “You boys okay?”

“More than adequate, Marshall,” Gottlieb sniffs, and Yancy follows him into the icebox. 

“I thought you destroyed this thing.”

The door swings shut behind them.

“It’s just a processor from the original unit. In case I needed to analyze anything... major.”

There’s a tone of bitterness in Gottlieb’s voice, and Yancy thinks he knows how he feels; the way he felt, when Aleksis told him that Gipsy had been moved to Oblivion Bay. Twenty years of research had gone into that quantum computer, the only machine on the planet capable of rendering the OS needed for jaeger control, the birth place of the AI that helped run the mechas’ higher functions, the origin of the encryption that was currently protecting the Class of 15’s archives.

Gottlieb had been tinkering with the design since he was a teenager.

And Herc had asked him to destroy it.

“Hermann, I know how hard it must have been to take Vanessa offline, but...”

The mathematician waves it away, jerky on his cane as he strides towards the small terminal on a central pillar, the only feature in the otherwise smooth, dark room. “War demands what it demands.” And he taps his head. “I can always craft myself another one. Different.” He smiles a little; tight, pained. “She’ll be different from the first, won’t interfere with what we’ve done. That’s the fun thing about AIs, you can evolve them into whatever you wish.”

He plugs the thumb drive in.

“If you say so,” Yancy mutters, and steps carefully forward, right next to him, watching lines of green numbers curl in spirals across the three-dimensional projection screen. “Will this work?”

Gottlieb sniffs, and pauses the cascade. “This will take me most of the night, Ranger Becket. I shall have an answer for you and the Marshall tomorrow.”

Yancy nods, extends a hand. “Thank you for everything you do, Doctor. Couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

“I realize that.”

The door opens again without Herc’s handprint.

The hallway is hot.

Herc’s waiting for him.

“I still need a room, sir.”

“We’ll head by Personnel, see what they can dig up. Shouldn’t be an issue. This place is dying anyway.”

+++++

They find him a place. Quiet. Far enough from Raleigh’s that he doesn’t have to worry about the kid finding it immediately.

He tries to tell himself he’s not avoiding his little brother.

Not avoiding Chuck.

Not avoiding all of it.

Because for as much as he thought he might be done, he realized on the way back to the ‘Dome from the Bone Slums... he’s not. This, if it’s true, if the PLA has the jaeger tech, this is an op waiting to happen. One he can’t turn down.

One that’s probably going to kill him.

He can’t saddle Raleigh with that.

Better to fade as much as he can, while he still can, back into the shadows of memory.

Let the kid move on.

What a fucking selfish thing he is.

He doesn’t call Scott, though.

And later that night, there’s a knock on his door, and there’s Chuck standing outside. Looking cold, and lost, and Yancy only stands there against him for a moment, blocking the way in with his body.

"Chuck, you and Raleigh..."

“I can’t sleep,” Chuck says in a smaller voice than Yancy would have thought him capable of. 

Hating himself a little, Yancy steps aside.

And goes back to bed. Without a word.

Chuck locks the door. Chuck strips down to his boxers. Chuck crawls in next to him and curls into his chest and pulls the covers so tight around them both Yancy feels like he can’t breathe.

Fuck. This kid. This kid is just…

“What happened?” he asks softly. “Between you and him?”

Chuck makes a small, pained noise.

Hugs closer to Yancy, clinging tight - like a little kid after a nightmare - and doesn’t say a goddamn thing.

Yancy sighs into the darkness of the room, the warmth of Chuck’s hair, and closes his eyes.

He’s always slept better with somebody else in his bed.

That’s what happens when you grow up with a little brother, he supposes.

And wonders where he went so horribly wrong with his life.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, sorry this is taking so long. I just... yeah, this story. Hopefully, getting somewhere good soon, promise!

It takes Hermann two days to pull Chau’s hacking program apart.

Another week to fully analyze it.

Make it useful.

And Yancy’s whole fucking world goes tits-up in that time.

+++++

_You wanna come?_

That was all it had taken. All that was uttered between them. To destroy everything that was there.

_...you wanna come..._

Maybe two months after they’d started... doing whatever it was they were doing together. 

After the struggle of breath.

The endorphin high. 

The bottle of liquor they’d drank. 

It had been an evening unremarkable, Chuck’s jacket hanging on the back of his chair and Chuck’s toothbrush in the bathroom and Chuck’s textbooks on the valet, and Raleigh had been squinting at one of those, coming back to himself, trying to decipher the very big words on the spine, half-wondering when the things had migrated in here.

When Chuck said it.

Said...

“You wanna come?”

“Huh?”

Chuck was on an elbow, looking at him, something in his eyes Raleigh hadn’t seen there before.

And, in that moment, all Raleigh could think about was Yancy. Stretched out in bed with him. Carding his hair. Whispering to him.

Day before Pitfall.

_Never leave me, Yance, please..._

_Shh, none of that. I love you, Raleigh. More than you’ll ever know. I love you..._

_Love you forever, big brother..._

“...oi, arsehole, you even listening to me?”

“Huh?”

Chuck flicked his chest. “I was sayin’ I wanted to get out of here. Nothing to do, all the jaegers gone, Dad doing his own thing...”

“Back to Australia?”

“Where’d you go, Becket? I was talkin’ ‘bout traveling. Seeing a bit of the world and all. Europe, maybe, or the States. Africa. Fuck, anything. We saved it, after all.” Chuck closed his eyes, half-falling into Raleigh’s shoulder. “I’d like to see it.”

Yancy. Laughing in the surf off Waikiki. Darting through the streets of Amsterdam. Pulling him under a street lamp in London and kissing him so sweet. Holding him at mom’s deathbed, at the funeral, fingers twisting together. Closing his eyes to step into the drift the first time, mind opening like a... 

“We used to travel.”

“Maybe not travel, then. But... find a place, you know? Not... not Australia.” Chuck’s fingers were unusually gentle on the hot skin of his shoulder. “Maybe New Zealand.”

New Zealand. He’d always wanted... he and Yancy had always talked about...

No.

No.

No, he couldn’t lose that, not that, not those, all the Polaroids fading on the walls on his mind as his brother rotted somewhere beneath the North Pacific waves, eaten by crabs, nothing left, not even bones, and here he was, here he was with another man whose heart he...

Chuck wasn’t Yancy.

_More than you’ll ever know, I love you..._

He rolled over, face in the pillow, trying to breathe.

“Lots of sheep,” Raleigh said, desperate.

“I could learn how to ski.” The kid’s voice was almost wistful, reflective, quiet. “Never learned how to ski.”

“It’s a bit like being on the skids...”

“... never really learned how to do anything, and the jaegers are gone, and I’d like...”

Chuck looked at him, then.

The cold stone walls in Raleigh’s head broke. Apart. Open.

Sunlight spilling in that mausoleum.

And he knew, he knew, _he knew_...

“You wanna come?” Chuck asked.

“What?”

“New Zealand. Mountains. Skiing. The fuck you think I’m talking about?”

“I already know how to ski.”

“No, mate, I mean... fuck, that’s not what I mean. I mean...”

“Why would I come?”

"Because we're... we're doing this, and it's..." Chuck swallowed. "Because I want you to come."

Raleigh frowned, the gravity dropping away, something, something rising in him that wasn't.... "I don't... why?"

A hand. On his chest. "C'mon, mate. You know why."

Oh.

_Oh._

Raleigh had shoved back from where his feet were tangled with Chuck’s under the covers, bile rising in his throat. 

Hating Chuck. 

_Hating_ him.

Of everything, Raleigh remembers the hate.

All the hate. For the way _Chuck Hansen_ stirred in his all the depths that were supposed to be dead.

All those things that died with Yancy.

The tomb he’d built inside himself to his brother’s memory.

Scorched earth. Barren sand.

Nothing was supposed to live there again.

Nothing _could_.

“The fuck? What... what do you think this is?” 

His laugh had been hollow, his disgust real.

Just pointed in the wrong direction.

Chuck’s face was the color of windfallen ash.

“But... we... I thought... it’s been… I’ve… we’ve been good, haven’t we?” A hand on his shoulder. Raleigh slapped it off. It came back. “The... the sex has been good, hasn’t it? Done... done everything...”

“Yeah, cause you’re a little cock-slut, Chuck, not...”

“W-what? No, I... you wanted to...”

“What, wanted _you_? Just because you let me come on your face or licked your own come off me? Like, what, like that matters?”

“Well, yeah, you..”

A mantra picked up, beating in the back of Raleigh’s skull.

_Hurt him. Hurt him before he hurts you. Hurt him before you can’t anymore. Before..._

“You’re an arrogant little prick, Chuck...”

“Hey, mate, that’s not...”

“Why would I want you-” - and Raleigh’s voice had taken on the timbre of rage, his mind spinning hysterically, fighting to hold on to those ragged memories, the way his brother had smiled at him, the way he’d kisses him, _don’t get cocky..._ , everything in him screaming now - “- when you’re not even capable of loving somebody?!”

Chuck had gone very still.

Very still.

Said the one thing, in the one voice, that had almost shattered Raleigh completely. 

“I’m not?”

Raleigh closed his eyes.

Turned back over.

To keep himself from breaking.

He didn’t know what he felt, but it wasn’t, it couldn’t be… couldn’t…

Chuck was nothing like Yancy.

_Your brother, your brother, your brother died in you and you don’t even have the decency to honor his memory..._

_Always here, baby, I’ll never leave you..._

_Yancy, please..._

He pulled the covers around him. Like a shroud. He couldn't deal with this. “Get out of my room.”

“Like I’d stay after that,” Chuck had sneered, "wanker!"

"Yeah, you really care about me."

"A fucking psychopath like you? Hardly, Becket.”

His hands shook as he pulled his clothes back on.

Raleigh had lasted as long as the closing of the door.

Before he’d bolted to the bathroom.

And let his stomach upend itself in the toilet.

Mako - pulled from her own room by the roiling emotion surging out into what was left of their last drift - had slapped him for it. 

Hard.

Tears in her eyes.

“I was wrong about you, Raleigh Becket. You are a coward.”

“He’ll be back.”

Chuck always came back.

Except he didn’t.

Except Chuck left for Lima. Two days later.

Without saying good bye.

Raleigh hadn’t even known he was gone. 

Not until Herc had dragged Raleigh down to the Kwoon.

Broke four of his ribs and two of his fingers and did everything short of beating him to within an inch of his life.

_Sir..._

_Take your own arse to Medical, Becket. Or lay here and fucking die. I don’t care much which at the moment._

_Marshall, please..._

_What?_

_Have you seen Chuck?_

And their Australian commander had cast an eye over him.

Told.

Spit.

Left.

Left him on the mat, heart crumbling apart inside his ribs.

As the hard reality crashed down around him.

Chuck Hansen, he’d fallen in love with Chuck Hansen, fallen hard, and Chuck...

There was still part of him - a huge part of him - that couldn’t, wouldn’t believe it.

Yancy had loved him.

Chuck... 

How could he love Chuck? Feel even a tenth, a hundredth, of what he’d felt for Yancy? That had been a lifetime together, shared moments and stolen affections, baths together as children and trips to hot springs together as adults.

He and Yancy had fit.

Perfect. One mind. One soul.

That was love.

Unconditional. Beautiful. Without reservation or withholding - and Chuck’s heart was a fortress, shuttered and locked against all assault. Boiling oil waiting at the gates.

He wasn’t wrong.

There was no love there for him.

No possibility of his love being returned.

Whatever Chuck felt for him... it wasn't. Couldn't be.

He was _right_.

About himself.

About Chuck.

Raleigh’s heart is Yancy’s. Always had been. Always will be.

It can never be anybody else’s.

Except Yancy doesn’t seem to want it back.

Raleigh can’t figure out why.

His brother is avoiding the fuck out of him right now. Or something.

And as for Chuck...

“You need something there, Ray?”

Yeah.

Not going well either.

Chuck’s sitting up on one of the free weight benches, elbows on his knees. He’s pale. The gym’s quiet - the old jaeger jockey gym. Exclusive. Private.

Almost 0200 in the fucking morning.

Raleigh hasn’t seen Yancy in almost thirty-six hours.

He’s got no idea why his brother’s avoiding him. 

Why Chuck’s here instead.

He feels another surge of that old hate.

But not even that can block out the smile on his face.

Seeing Chuck...

Fuck. He’s beautiful.

Where’s he been?

Why isn’t anybody telling him anything?

“I, uhh... I couldn’t sleep.” _What’s your excuse?_

Chuck just nods.

Stands up.

Makes like he’s going for the weight rack.

And collapses.

Raleigh catches Chuck before he can hit the ground.

The kid’s pale.

Sweating.

Clinging to him like he’s the last scrap of driftwood in the ocean, and Raleigh wonders, wonders for a moment, if...

But Chuck shoves him off.

Raleigh wants to apologize.

He does.

But it’s early - or late, or both - and all he can think about right now is crawling into bed next to Yancy and...

“Hey, Chuck?” 

“What?”

“Have you seen... you seen my brother?”

Chuck’s face twists. Smooths. “That’s right. Your brother.”

It’s all he says.

Raleigh came up to use the treadmill. But the silence is trying to kill him.

He wanders the hallways instead.

Until he’s too tired to figure out anything but the way back to his own room.

He sleeps until noon.

Makes it to his LOCCENT shift six hours late.

Nobody cares.

He wonders if maybe Chuck didn’t have a point about leaving. About doing something else. Doesn’t seem to be a point to the Shatterdome anymore. To any of it.

But Yancy’s here now.

Raleigh can’t leave.

Because Yancy won’t.

Yancy won’t leave him again.

Even if Yancy won’t come to him, Yancy wouldn’t...

And Raleigh pulls up the personnel database, sitting bored at his station, where Tendo used to sit before Tendo dropped his papers and went back to Florida where his wife and baby were waiting for him.

A lot of people have left.

Most.

If he’d gone with Chuck...

“Maybe you should have,” Mako tells him over dinner, in the half-empty mess. 

“What about Yancy?”

“He was dead. You cannot mourn the dead forever.”

Her eyes are haunted. Like she knows this first hand. 

She has an offer with the Japanese space program. Go home. Work with machines, engines, metal, hydrazine. Do important things - they’re talking about a moon mission. Mars, even. Colonies. Dreams.

Mako needs a dream. 

“He’s not dead, though.”

“No,” she agrees. “He is not.”

“Yeah, so...”

“But there is still Chuck,” she says, and her eyes are as hard as they were the day she slapped him. “He is different, since Yancy brought him back from Lima.”

“What do you mean, brought him back?”

“I know Chuck,” she says, rolling her tea mug between her hands. “He would not leave...”

It’s her own, brought from the island she’s returning to, one of those cracked, perfect things the Japanese make. She brings it to every meal. Raleigh has never asked her the story behind it - but that’s the way it is with her. Finding her stories inside their own penumbra. 

The drift with Yancy had never been like that.

“Yeah?”

“He would not leave Max. He did not intend to ever return.”

“But he’s here.”

“What has your brother been doing, Raleigh? How did he find Chuck?” She picks at his food. "What has Chuck been doing, that he comes home so sick?"

He doesn’t know.

And Raleigh doesn't care. The days where Chuck was gone and Yancy was gone and the darkness had eaten back into Raleigh’s skull are over. Chuck... Chuck was a mistake. A mistake, because the entire time he was with Chuck, Yancy was alive, alive, alive, and Raleigh was betraying him, and...

And then there’s Yancy, standing at the stairs with a tray, looking around, looking a little lost.

He comes when Raleigh waves.

“I don’t care,” he whispers desperately to Mako, as she rolls her eyes, as Yancy sits down - careful, across the table, where Raleigh can’t touch him.

Mako introduces herself.

Yancy shakes her hand, gives her some crap about being _in the kid’s old seat, huh? how did gipsy handle for you? heard you made some modifications, you guys gotta tell me about that sword..._

She’s pleasant as she always is, but guarded, looking at Raleigh. Like she expects him to ask.

Yancy’s gregarious as he always was, but quiet, studiously watching his food. Like he expects him to ask.

Raleigh doesn’t.

He doesn’t care.

Just as long as Yancy’s back.

He doesn’t care.

So when Yancy looks at him, after Mako leaves, and asks _have you been to see Chuck?_ , Raleigh doesn’t know what to do.

“I don’t want Chuck, Yance,” he says, smiling over the hole in his heart, to reassure his big brother that...

“This is why we’ve got different rooms,” Yancy groans, and picks up his tray. Leaves. Without another word.

+++++

The days pass slowly, as Yancy waits for his answers to come back, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself.

The old patterns don’t fit anymore - playing cards, watching tv, talking to Scott, fucking Scott, waiting for things to happen. He’s got nothing to work on, until Gottlieb’s numbers come back.

And he doesn’t understand what the fuck’s going on with these infuriating kids of his.

Chuck’s on auto-pilot, mostly. Sleeping a lot. Resting. Reading. Mostly in his dad’s room, and Yancy tries to visit with him for a few hours every day. But the only time he really talks is when he comes by at night, to curl in next to Yancy.

Herc’s never around.

Off working with Gottlieb. Or avoiding Yancy - Yancy’s not sure which, and he doesn’t try to seek out the man to ask.

He wanders a bit, through the ‘Dome and out into Hong Kong proper. Gets dim sum at one of those places with the little trolleys, and thinks about the time he and Raleigh went out for the stuff in London. Walks along what’s left of the harbor, snapping off photos, and thinks about the job he took in Anchorage after dad left, down on the docks, just to keep his little brother fed. 

Everyone he meets is cheery, friendly, eager to sell him something. 

Everyone is rebuilding.

Everyone, except for him.

Encounters with Raleigh are painful, awkward. It’s clear Raleigh has no idea what to say or do, that the kid’s incredibly hurt by the fact that his older brother won’t so much as hug him. It’s selfish not to - Yancy knows this - but until the moment Knifehead ripped him from the conn-pod, his entire life had been dedicated to his little brother. Feeding him. Holding him. Loving him.

Everything had always been Raleigh’s.

And he’d been happy to give it.

Even if he never should have, and...

“You... you could have stayed with me,” Raleigh says, the afternoon he comes by to look at Yancy’s new room, voice quiet and face unreadable. 

“There’s only the one bunk, kid.”

“Never stopped us before.”

 _No_ , Yancy wants to say, _it never did._ Nothing had, back then. Didn’t matter if it was a shit dorm room or a party with swarms of paparazzi outside or the fucking squadron lounge. Raleigh had been so full of life back then, so happy, so... insatiable wasn’t quite the right words, because Raleigh had never been a sex fiend, but he’d been young and strong and riding the high of life at the top.

Hell, they both were.

Right now, Raleigh looks old. 

Yancy feels ancient.

Six years apart.

Might as well be a lifetime.

“I got my own quarters,” he says, slow, hating the words but knowing he has to get them out. “It’s okay, kid. You don’t have share anymore.”

“What if I want to?”

And there it is. Of course, there it is.

Fuck, why’d he come back here? Should have dropped Chuck off and kept going.

Should never have come back.

He dreams that night, Chuck pressed against him, the week he spent in a basement in Mexico, separated from Scott, caught out, one of those fucking drug dealers who trafficked for Chau convinced he was CIA, the smell of that fucking acetylene torch and...

Chuck’s hand. On his face.

“You were screaming,” Chuck whispers.

“Sorry, kid.”

"Can I do anything?"

"Just go back to sleep, okay? I'm fine. I'm fine."

He lays awake in the dark for a long time after that.

Sweating.

He's not fine.

Everything’s wrong.

“Heard you did well in the harness,” Yancy says to Mako, the next morning, a rare day that she’s not eating breakfast with Raleigh, where Raleigh isn’t anywhere around.

She doesn’t miss a beat.

“It was your seat, Mister Becket. Raleigh would have...” and she stops.

“If I’d come back to fill it,” he agrees.

She squares her shoulders, and stares back. Not quite a little girl putting on airs - he’s spent enough time in Japan to know there’s real steel in this one, more than most and not in the same way - but she’s still painfully young. 

He’s sure she has a story. Everybody has a story these days. 

He doesn’t exactly care. 

He’s read her psyche profile; Scott got it for him when he found out that she was piloting with Raleigh. Would have washed out of the Academy, if it hadn’t been for Stacker, and for a bitter second, Yancy wonders if the Weis and the Kaidanovskies would still be alive if Herc had tapped him to come back for Pitfall. 

“What’d you see, Miss Mori? When you drifted with my brother?”

“You mean, did I see the two of you?”

“...yeah.”

“Yes, I saw that. I saw how much he loved, loves, you.”

“And you aren’t...”

“No. Not at all.” She shakes her head. 

“And Chuck?”

“Yes, him too, I think. Raleigh has been... not well, since Chuck left.” She lifts her eyes. “He needs you, Yancy.”

“No, Mako. He doesn’t.”

Gottlieb works on Chau’s program. Pulls it apart. Puts it back together. No tracers, he says. Clean. _Should be able to make a run on the PLA’s ice_ , he says around day six, and that’s about the point where Yancy realizes he’s lost in some sort of nerd-coma, and is better left alone. 

Yancy considers calling Scott.

He goes to the gym instead, tries to work the sick feeling in his stomach out on the treadmill. But three hours and twenty minutes of showering later, and nothing’s better.

And everything’s worse.

Because there’s his brother. And...

“Raleigh...”

“Yance, please,” Raleigh says, gets in front of him, cutting him off from the exit and the way out of all the questions he doesn’t know how to answer without destroying his little brother in the process. “Please. You’re back from the dead, you’ve been here like a week, and I’ve barely seen you. I... I thought things... you and me...”

Yancy sighs, and slumps back onto the locker room bench. “Rals, I... we can’t go back to... to that.”

Raleigh takes a step back, like he’s been slapped. “What?”

“Can’t I just be your brother for a while?” he pleads, not wanting to give voice to this - all these regrets, these fears. 

“How are you not my brother?” 

“When was the last time I was?”

Raleigh sits down beside him, face pinched.

“You’ve always been my brother. You can’t... you’ll never be anything else.”

_Your lover, your ruin, I never should have touched you like that, I had no right, no place, I destroyed you._

The damn words are tearing his throat bloody, trying to crawl back down to the darkness of his lungs, die in safety.

He doesn’t say them.

“You died.”

“I know.”

“You left me.”

“I had to.”

“I’ve been so alone.”

“I didn’t want that, I swear, I...”

“I love you,” Raleigh says.

Pleads.

And Yancy’s powerless to stop his little brother from scooting closer, swinging a leg over, settling in his lap. 

His back hits the metal of the lockers. “Kid... anyone could see us.”

“Never stopped us before, did it?” Raleigh smiles hopefully, tight enough to shatter apart at the slightest touch. “Remember when I used to crawl into bed with you, when mom was still...”

“Rals, don’t...”

“Remember? You’d be asleep and I’d prod you awake.” Raleigh’s hand start moving. “You’d grumble and scoot over and let me in. I’d lay my head on your arm, and...”

“Fucking stop it!”

He doesn’t mean to shove Raleigh off as hard as he does.

No help for it.

Kid still ends up on his ass on the floor.

Looking betrayed.

“Yance...”

“Is this all I am to you, Raleigh?” Yancy snaps, angry now, gesturing wildly between them. “Your personal fucktoy, like, you can just climb all over me and demand anything you want and I’ll give it to you?”

Raleigh shakes his head as he picks himself up. “Yancy, I don’t...”

“We’re not teenagers anymore, Rals! Fuck, I would have thought you’d have learned to live without me all this time!”

The kid’s hands stop, mere inches from his chest. Curl back into themselves. “I... what?”

“Rals, please,” Yancy says, and his heart is shattering like glass, “ _please_ , this thing, you and me, we can’t...”

“We can do anything we want.” Raleigh’s smile is beautiful.

_That squirming baby just back from the hospital. Propped up in the sofa, eyes wide as he listened to his older brother read to him. Dashing through the leaf piles. Hurtling snowballs in the afternoon dark. Crawling into bed with him and waking up hard, whimpering a little, what’s wrong with me Yancy; don’t worry kid I’ll show you what to do..._

“You and Chuck...”

“There is no me and Chuck,” Raleigh snaps, and runs his hands around Yancy’s neck, buries his face in Yancy’s shoulder. “I love you. Just you.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Yancy murmurs. “What about Chuck?”

“What about Chuck?” Raleigh says, desperate, the lie loud in those three little words. “Please, brother...”

And Yancy’s about to tell him something.

Anything.

To save him.

Except there’s Chuck.

Standing in the door of the locker room.

Pale.

Like he’s seen a ghost.

Yancy doesn’t say anything. Just meets that anguished gray-eyes gaze.

And before he can figure out what to say, what to do, Chuck’s gone.

+++++

Chuck comes by that night, though.

Chuck has come by every night since they got here.

Yancy always lets him in.

Chuck always locks the door behind them.

But tonight’s different.

Tonight Chuck doesn’t smile. Doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t cry. 

Just folds himself into Yancy’s arms and doesn’t say a word.

All the nights before this, felt like comfort.

This feels intimate.

Yancy’s got no idea what to do with it. 

“I should have died, you know,” Chuck tells him later, after they’ve turned the lights off, after they’ve gone to bed.

“Pitfall?”

Chuck’s hair slides across his chest as he nods. “I should have died. I thought I was going to. I... I didn’t want the Marshall to shove me in that fucking pod, I didn’t...”

“So you and Raleigh, what, started fucked?”

“Started as fucking.”

Chuck’s quiet.

Yancy can’t hold it in.

“You’re in love with my brother, aren’t you?” 

That pliant body goes stiff. “No.”

“Chuck, don’t lie to me.”

Chuck’s quiet for a moment.

“Would you believe me? If... if I said it?” 

And it hits him.

“Did he not?”

“I don’t wanna talk about him.” Chuck’s eyes are luminous in the near-darkness, blinking up at him with all the urgency of youth. He’s like a kitten, this one, in the night. When he thinks nobody notices. “Fuck him.”

Yancy feels like he can see to the bottom of his very soul.

“Chuck, please, you and him...”

“Stop telling me what I should do.”

“Chuck...”

“Just stop talking, old man.”

Chuck kisses him.

He kisses Chuck.

Chuck crawls up over top of him, moaning, whimpering - and it’s the whimpering that does it, that short-circuits all of Yancy’s better sense, but the breathless _love you_ that brings him back down to earth.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's some potentially triggering stuff in here, with the way Chuck feels about how Raleigh's been treating him. I'm not sure how to tag it, just that Chuck feels like he was forced into some things he wasn't comfortable with. Just please be aware.

Chuck barely hears himself, as those words slip free. But slip free they do, and hear them Yancy does, and for a moment, the big blond doesn't so much as breathe.

And then.

"Chuck..."

"Fuck..." 

He rolls out of bed, going for his clothes, white-hot panic coursing through his veins. Why'd he have to go and say that? Why'd he have to go and _do_ that? Falling in love with another of these fucking Beckets, with their goddamn perfect bodies and strong hands and the way they both turn into cuddleslut puppies in the middle of the night when they're asleep, and just...

Fuck.

"Chuck, kid..."

"I'm not a fucking kid, Yance!"

"Yeah, I know, Jesus, please, just..."

He yanks his pants on, slinging his jacket on and gathering up the rest of his shit. He has to get out of here. Now. Before he explodes. Implodes. Whatever. His palms ache. Fuck. Fucked up a good thing. Fuck. Fucking Becket belong to his fucking little brother, and it's all just...

"Chuck!"

A hand, on his shoulder, before he can get out of the room.

It jerks too hard.

Slams him back against the wall.

Yancy. Tired. Half-naked. Scared. One hundred and eighty degrees from his normal unflappable detachment. 

In the weak light from the sick LED lamp on the nightstand, Chuck can see every scar, every jagged peak and valley left in the older man's pale skin, from whatever he's been doing for Dad the last few years. The drive suit burns, down his right side and across his right pec, a perfect match to Raleigh's. Fainter, though. Like they've been worked on, and...

" _Chuck_. We can't."

He closes his eyes against the warm, calloused palm that cups his cheek. "Shouldn't have said that."

"No, shit, kid, I-"

And for a second, Chuck's heart leaps.

"-I believe you. But we can't. I... I can't."

He's hesitating, though - or maybe that's just Chuck imagining it, maybe it doesn't matter. "Why? Cause you gotta go back out in the field?" Yancy starts. Chuck uses the opportunity to shove him off. "Go blow something else up with Uncle Scott?"

Anger. Panic. Yancy’s eyes are wide. “What? No, I... I can't do that to Raleigh."

And something in Chuck just snaps.

"Fuck Raleigh!" he explodes, feeling a burst inside his chest, like the phantom sensation, under harness, of Striker’s AKTs slamming into Mutavore. "Fuck him! I don't... I don't care about that fucking cuntlicking..."

And a rough hand grabs his chin. Jerks him up. Shakes him. Hard. 

Yancy growls.

"That's my brother you're talking about.”

Chuck glares back, fury whipping in him.

Because there it is. There it will always be. Raleigh's his brother. Yancy’s little brother. 

Family.

Home. 

What's some pissant kid from Australia next to that?

Who the fuck is he?

Who the fuck has he ever been?

"He's still an asshole," Chuck still snarls, unwilling to be cowed. By a Becket. Again. "Maybe he's not the same retarded little puppy that used to tag along behind you everywhere."

Direct hit. 

Yancy flinches. Lets him go. 

Sinks back onto the bed.

Sounding like a man who’s lost his entire world. 

“Yeah. He's not."

Chuck shifts, suddenly uncomfortable. "I... I didn't mean..."

"He wasn't like this, Chuck, you know, before. Whatever he said to you... fuck, I never should have left him."

"So you're going back to him?"

Yancy shakes his head slowly, blond hair dragging through his fingers. "No."

"But you and him... you're like, soul mates or something."

That gets Chuck a look. A weird one. 

His ears go hot. 

"I'm not. Just...he's no good without you."

Yancy unfurls his limbs a little, sighing. Like this is a Decision. "He's gonna have to be."

"So. If you and him..."

"I'm not gonna take you away from him, Chuck."

"Oi! I don't belong to him! Not now, not ever!"

"Yeah. Yeah, I know." He sighs. "I took Naomi away from him. Bitch, that one, just wanted to fuck a Ranger. So I fucked her first, got her off the kid's scent. Him and his dam big puppy dog heart, would have just broken it on her. But I took somebody he wanted, and it still hurt him." Yancy looks at him, then. "And he just sort of wanted her."

"He doesn't want me. Never did, I reckon.” Chuck sits down next to Yancy, laying his head on the older man's shoulder. "He just wanted a wet hole."

"I guarantee you he didn't. Not his thing. Never was."

"You're the one who agreed he's different."

"I did at that."

"Yancy..."

But the ex-Ranger is standing, moving away, pulling on a pair of sweats he got from issue, and it hits Chuck, then, that there isn't a single personal effect in this room, that Yancy has nothing that didn't come from supply, that anything that might have held a memory for him is back down in Raleigh's room, in that little box in the closet or the pack of photos on the wall, that this has probably been the way it's been for the older man since he woke up in Russia. No connections, no past, no drift. Nothing.

Just whatever he and Uncle Scott were blowing up this week.

And, stomach twisting, Chuck wants to do something about that.

But he's got nothing to offer.

He's not Raleigh. 

He's useless.

Dead weight Yancy packed back from Lima.

And he really, really, wants a hit. That always makes this feeling go away, this sick feeling, like he's gonna throw up any second.

He falls over on his side, curling back up in the sheets, acutely nauseous. 

The bed dips beside him. Yancy’s hand is back - in his hair this time, stroking, caressing, almost...

And there’s a knock.

+++++

A knock.

A shout.

_Yance, if you’re in there..._

And Yancy would recognize that voice anywhere.

Fuck.

“Put your shirt back on,” he hisses at Chuck, who’s sprawled bleary-eyed and miserable in his bed. No mistaking what’s been going on in here - except it wasn’t. But doesn’t matter, Herc’s probably going to murder him anyway.

“Huh?”

_Becket!_

“That’s why.”

It’s all the time they get.

Before Herc punches in the door code override, and lets himself in.

Herc ignores him - completely, studiously.

Looks at Yancy instead.

“Put some damn clothes on, Becket.”

“What’s going on, sir?”

“The fuck, dad?”

Herc’s eyes, back on Chuck. “This where you’ve been sleeping, then?”

“Fuck you, old man.”

Yancy shoves his feet into his boots, holding up a hand. “Chuck, go back to sleep, okay? I’ll be back as soon as I can be.”

Chuck frowns. Herc doesn’t say a word.

Until they’re halfway down to the lab.

“Your brother broke his heart.”

“I know that.”

“You’ll not do the same thing to him.”

“I know, sir. I wo-“

But Herc stops. Stops him. Finger to his chest. “No, Becket, I mean, I will kill you before I allow a repeat of that.”

“I’m the one who hauled his ass out of Lima!” Yancy snaps, not wanting to think about Chuck, his Chuck, vomiting in the hotel room toilet, begging for a hit, whoring himself out in that fucking bar for it, for Raleigh, because Raleigh... “I fucking _know_ what Raleigh did to him! Do you?”

For a second, Herc looks like a man intent on murder.

For a moment.

And then he’s just broken again, tired; resigned. “At least he’s talking to somebody.” He starts off down the hallway again.

Yancy follows. “Wouldn’t say he’s talking to me.” He’s quiet for a moment. “This why you didn’t tell my brother I was alive?”

“No.”

“Bullshit.”

“You didn’t tell him you were alive, Yance.”

“Like fuck, Herc. We were...”

“If you wanted to see him, you could have.”

“You’re the one who sent me on that. I wouldn’t have...”

“Tell yourself whatever you need to, Becket. You _stayed_ on that mission, after you knew what was going on...”

Yancy could hit him, he really could. “Oh, don’t give me that shit! You know what they had!”

Herc just gives him a look - a very intentional look - and Yancy sighs.

Point made.

Gottlieb’s waiting for them at the lab.

He’s found it.

The backdoor protocols.

The way in.

The way through.

Spread across the biggest projection screen Yancy’s ever seen.

What they’re doing. What they’re facing. What the CCP took, and what ’15 needs to take back, because what the PLA is going to with this is...

Yancy closes his eyes.

“Where is that?” 

“Tibet,” Gottlieb says, flat, pinched.

“Fucking hoped we were done with the mountains,” Yancy grumbles.

Herc takes a steps towards it, half through the wash of primary light, hair on fire in with the code. His back is to them. For some reason, Yancy’s reminded of the fact that this man, in front of him, has faced down more kaijuu than any other Ranger in history.

He’s the oldest of them last. One of the only of them left.

Sixteen kills to his name.

“You still want to tell me how it’s my fault, you? Your brother?”

Yancy kept his eyes on the figures, the little discreet spirals of information playing out in their arcs, mapping a future for the Pacific Rim that’s far more devastating than anything the kaijuu could have done.

And there he was, disarming his own country while this was marching forward.

This was not going to be some two-week arson mission, Yancy realized.

This was...

Well, he’d be lucky to come back from it at all.

“Raleigh’s my fault,” he says, not daring to look at Herc. “Raleigh’s always been my fault.”

“I can...”

“I’ll call Scott. I’ll do it.”

“Yancy...”

“There’s nobody else, Herc.”

He wasn’t coming back from this.

In a way, it’s almost a relief.

Ever since Knifehead, since waking up in Vladivostok, learning his brother was missing and presumed dead, Yancy’s felt like half a person. He lost something in the drift that day. Broke something. Part of himself, the best part of himself, the only part of himself he ever gave a damn about. That cannot be returned or repaired. 

And he’s wanted it to be over.

Fuck, how he just wants it to be over.

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with himself anymore. Once it is. Now that it is. 

_Not quite yet,_ Yancy tells himself.

“I’ll call Scott.”

“You sure about this, Yancy? Raleigh...”

“Fuck you, Herc.”

+++++

The first few months, after Knifehead, were the easiest.

Painkillers and hospital stays have a weird way of dilating time; Raleigh barely noticed, laying there in the old Elmendorf clinic as the burns closed on his arms and the muscles atrophied in his legs, how much had passed. 

Yancy had been ripped from his mind.

But back then, there was still hope he was alive. Somewhere. Somehow. 

Raleigh’s hope.

Because no matter how many times they tried to tell him Yancy was dead, Raleigh knew better - thought he knew better.

That first night, when _sharing a bed_ became _sleeping together_ , when something they’d been dong in too-small rental apartments and hotel rooms their entire life shifted into something better. 

When it had to. 

When mom had died and dad hadn’t been home for a month. When he’d woken up in the pre-dawn darkness of the little one-bedroom place they were renting on Yancy’s shit paycheck from the packing plant. His cheek, resting on his big brother’s chest, his mind, thinking, thinking, that maybe if he crawled up, just dared to... 

“What are you doing, kiddo?” Yancy had whispered, waking up as Raleigh pulled away.

“Kissing you.”

“Yeah, I... why?”

“Because I love you.”

He hadn’t understood the look on his brother’s face. He’s never wanted to understand it, maybe. Maybe he knew, back then, that he was damning them both. To become what they became.

_...can’t I just be your brother...when was the last time I was..._

“I love you too, Raleigh. But...”

“Please,” he’d said, trying to sound strong, only managing to beg. “Please, Yancy, please...”

And Yancy had pushed up on his elbow. Cupped his face with both hand, raw and chapped and cut-up from work. Sighed. Swallowed. Pulled his hips back a little. He was hard. He was blushing. 

Raleigh had never seen his big brother like that before.

Raleigh has never thought of anything as _beautiful_ since.

“Okay, kid. Okay.”

That morning wasn’t just his big brother cuddling him in the cold. Wasn’t merely his big brother showing him how to get himself off. 

That morning was different.

That morning - and all the mornings, and all the evenings, that followed - got him through.

And then, when they got accepted to Jaeger Academy and Jaz went to live with a friend until she just disappeared too, sixteen and mad at the world, Yancy became his only reason.

Took care of him.

Yancy always took care of him.

It took a long time to come to terms with the fact that his entire world had ended that night.

Knifehead took his life from him.

And once Raleigh realized it, he just wanted it to be over.

The months and years that came after that were harder.

Harder over time, not easier.

Harder, because it was all taking him further from Yancy.

And he couldn’t...

Raleigh couldn’t sleep, after, well, after the gym. He doesn’t sleep well under normal circumstances; it was hard, sleeping alone after all those innocent years spent feeling his brother’s heart beat against his own in the darkness. Things had been better with Chuck, good with Chuck, he’d slept with Chuck.

His guts twist, just thinking about it.

About what he’d done to his brother with that.

Because even if Yancy didn’t want him anymore...

He knows he should apologize. For what happened in the locker room. He had no right - evidently he had no right, of course he had no right, maybe he’d never had the right.

Because Yancy was his older brother, after all, and brothers weren’t supposed to sleep together. They just...

Mako’s quiet, when he goes asks her about it. Across the hall, to her room.

She’s packing.

“The Tanegashima offer came through?”

She looks haggard. “I accepted last night, Raleigh. I am sorry, I cannot stay here, this place, where Sensei...”

He holds up a hand, glad the ghost drift is gone, so she can’t feel how his heart is breaking. “I’m happy for you,” he tells her, adding, in Japanese, “I expect you to name your first kid after me.”

She laughs, and hugs him, and he heads out for Yancy’s room, where the LOCCENT records indicated Yancy’s room would be.

Alone.

Wanting to-

But it doesn’t quite work out that way. 

Because when he knocks, it’s not Yancy who answers the door.

It’s Chuck.

Chuck.

Hair as messed up as it always is in the mornings, a shapeless issue tee hanging loose over his stocky frame. Joy, fading to fear, as he blinks back.

“Raleigh.”

“Where’s Yancy?” Raleigh says automatically, mind stuttering on the details, confusion warring with rage for his attention.

Chuck swallows. “Dad came and got him. Umm, last night, umm...”

“Herc?”

“Yeah, there’s a...” and the younger pilot waves his hand. “You know.”

Raleigh tears a hand through his own hair, wanting to scream. “No,” he grits out. “I don’t fucking know. I don’t know where Yancy’s been or where you fucking went or...”

“Oi, where I went?”

“Yeah, where you went. You fucking up and disappeared to Lima, without even letting me have a chance to...”

“Chance to what?” Chuck demands.

_... say goodbye... apologize... kiss you... punch you in the fucking face, or..._

Raleigh just crosses his arms. “You know.”

“Yeah, I know,” comes the reply, almost serene.

And then Chuck’s on him, fisting both hands in his sweater and throwing him bodily into the room, kicking the door shut behind him.

Every alarm bell in Raleigh’s head goes off.

Chuck sneers, circling. “I know what you wanted from me, Becket. And I’m so sorry I ran off, that your little fuck-toy decided to think for himself and leave.”

Raleigh frowns. “Chuck, no, I... I’ve been worried about you, and...”

“Like you care about me now?!” Chuck half-yells, and slams the fat of his fist into the hard metal of the door. “Like fuck you care about me, Becket! All you wanted was a hole!”

For a moment, everything in Raleigh’s head stops working. “I... what? Chuck, I...”

“Yeah you did, you wanker! You just wanted something you could hate fuck! Tear up! You didn’t give a shit about me, never did, never will, because the only thing you’ve ever loved is your fucking brother!”

“Chuck...”

“I did everything, everything you asked! Even the stuff I didn’t want, that hurt, because you wanted it! You never asked, you just took, and I _let you_!” Chuck is screaming now, screaming in a way that’s threatening to stop Raleigh’s heart. “But where’d that fucking get me, huh? Some fucking inexperienced kid you chewed up and tossed away the second you didn’t want...”

“Chuck!” And Raleigh grabs him, slams him back into the wall, frantic now. “What are you talking about?”

“I bet you got a good first time, didn’t you? With your brother?” Chuck hisses, dropping about ten decibels, eyes alight now with the kind of victory that comes in the depths of mindless rage. “I bet he took good care of you, kissed you and held you and made it good, didn’t he? I bet you and him laid there and giggled together, when you fucked...”

Raleigh can’t answer. The words won’t come.

And Chuck is - goddammit - not done.

“Yeah, Yancy took care of you. Of course he did. He never came on your face and kicked you out of the room. He never tore your neck up with his teeth so badly that your old man had to stitch you up. He never...” Chuck slumps, rubbing his hands over his eyes. “He asked you what you wanted.”

Raleigh feels like he’s been torn apart, atom by atom. And he lets Chuck go, stepping back. “I didn’t... you never said anything about...”

“Like it would have meant anything to you?” Chuck asks quietly.

Too quietly.

Filled with pain.

“I...”

“You don’t have to lie to me. You needed it. You needed to hurt something. Maybe I needed to be hurt. But I was an idiot for thinking I could ever mean anything to you. That those nights you stayed were...” Chuck stops, swallows. Looks back at the bed, a longing in the slope of his thick form that both enrages and terrifies Raleigh. “But who the fuck am I, next to him?”

“Chuck...”

“I’m just an egotistical jerk with daddy issues, not worth a shit, much less a second’s kindness from anyone. I should be dead. I was supposed to be dead. I’m no good.” His eyes are red, tears pooling. “I know that, Raleigh, I know what I am. You didn’t give me anything I didn’t deserve.”

“I never...”

He’s shaking his head. “Herc’s little child soldier, I fucking _know_. But at least he taught me some fucking self-discipline. I didn’t turn out a selfish spoiled little bitch, like Yancy and the PPDC let you become.”

“No, I...”

“But maybe that makes sense,” and those tears are leaking down his cheeks now, “because you forced yourself on him, like you forced yourself on me, and _fuck_ you. You’ve taken everything from me, everything, and I _can’t_...”

Raleigh can’t take it a second longer.

He tries to touch.

Just touch.

As if somehow, that could wipe all this away, make it okay, tell Chuck that he never...

But Chuck hits him.

Hard. Enough to knock him down. 

And, as pain blooms red-hot across his jaw, all he can do is stare.

Up at Chuck, who’s gone a very strange shade of gray.

“Fuck you,” Chuck growls, and his entire body is trembling, sweating. “Fuck you, Raleigh Becket. Just leave me alone.” 

Raleigh half expects a kick to the ribs, as Chuck storms off.

That’s bad.

What’s worse is realizing - finally, suddenly - that this, Chuck, is probably why Yancy’s been pushing him away.

And, laying there on the floor of his brother’s room, all Raleigh can think, over the sound of his heart grinding to dust in his chest, is that Yancy deserves Chuck.

Yancy deserves better than him. 

He always did.

+++++

Yancy doesn’t bother going back to see Chuck. Or Raleigh. He needs space, time to sort out everything in his head.

So. He goes out, through the empty bays, the gothic heights where Gipsy once stood, his girl, abandoned, atomic dust at bottom of the sea now, out to the wide landing pads, to watch the sun rise.

And, with shaking, tired fingers, calls Scott.

“It’s real, buddy. We gotta take care of it. Last one, and we’re done.”

_Bout fuckin’ time. Hermann sent me the overview. I’m gonna need some help on this one, Yance. Can’t do it alone._

Yancy sighs.

The sunrise is beautiful.

From what he hears, they don’t have dawn like this in China anymore.

Nothing but smog. 

The ruin of the selfish, in there.

Fuck only knows what they’ll find in it.

“Yeah, Scott. I know. Anything you need.” 

Coming back was a mistake.

_New Delhi, four days, be there._

A huge fucking mistake.

He never should have set foot in the ‘Dome. Let Raleigh think he was dead. Let Raleigh move on.

“See you then.”

Scott says goodbye, but Yancy doesn’t listen. Just clicks the phone shut, and keeps staring back out at the eastern sky. Until the sun is high enough to disappear into the clouds above, and he had to go back inside.

This shit doesn’t plan itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *whew*
> 
> ...so... yeah...
> 
> Chuck had a lot of feelings tangled up, and yes, I haven't gotten into this too much, but... he didn't have the best time before, even if he wanted Raleigh. But I promise a happy ending - I promise!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry. This is... disjointed, and not what I had planned, and I'm not happy with it. I owe y'all some nice fluffy OT3 sex at some point here soon, I really do...
> 
> D:

It takes all of Raleigh’s effort to get himself off the floor.

Go to his shift.

Even though he really doesn’t want to. He isn’t a soldier; hasn’t been one for a long time, maybe never was.

Yancy was always the more military of them.

It makes sense, in a way.

Part of him wants to curl up in the hollow where Chuck and Yancy slept last night. Touch them both again. And he has the wildest thought, a giddy, terrifying thought; sleeping next to them, both of them, all of them together like...

But no. There’s no point. Yancy was always the big brother, always giving, but there was always the one or two toys he’d guard jealously, the scant few, precious possessions he wouldn’t share.

They can’t share Chuck.

Yancy wouldn’t.

So Raleigh gets up, goes in, sits for far too long doing nothing important - there are some UN bulletins he pushes to Herc, the usual bullshit reports Herc pushes to the UN. The hours roll by. Lunch is consumed. Reports are generated. The Breach doesn’t reopen.

The very idea of it makes Raleigh sick.

Days like this, when it’s this slow, it’s almost more than he can stand.

Or maybe it’s just Tendo’s empty chair.

Fuck, he misses Tendo.

Misses everyone from the old Icebox days.

Back when things were still... well, when the only people Yancy would steal from him were the vapid-eyed Jaeger Flies who weren’t after anything real.

Naomi.

Just like Chuck.

Just like...

And Raleigh sits forward, fingers tapping on his console. 

He knows he shouldn’t.

He pulls it up anyway.

Every Shatterdome has a tracking system, one that monitors the location of every troop by the RFID chip in their ID badge. Nobody ever checks the logs, really, outside of official investigations, and it takes Raleigh a few minutes to stumble his way through the system. But when he does, something interesting happens.

Yancy doesn’t show up.

Neither does Chuck.

The latter’s badge registered a winding path through the ‘Dome, for about an hour after he left Yancy’s room, while Yancy’s terminated about fifty feet outside the door, somehow. Chuck’s flows, on Raleigh’s screen, to one of the side guardhouse exits.

So he’s out in Hong Kong.

Probably with Yancy.

Probably having fun, and...

Raleigh turns his terminal off, drops his face in his hands, the world falling out from beneath his feet.

Of course Yancy would want Chuck. Of course Chuck would want Yancy. Yancy had always been such a good, attentive, loving...

Raleigh stares at the screen. What? What word goes there? What was Yancy, back then? Not his brother, they weren’t just siblings, were they? Not after... and maybe that was what Yancy was talking about.

Maybe they aren’t anything to each other anymore.

Maybe it’s his fault.

His fault.

Chuck was right.

It’s his fucking fault.

Herc’s there, twelve hours on the nose, at the end of shift to watch change-over. He looks like hell warmed over, but he nods at all the right times and asks all the right questions and leaves with the usual folder shoved under his elbow.

Raleigh sort of wants to go after him.

He doesn’t.

He’s got more important things to do.

More important conversations to have.

Tell Chuck... tell Chuck he was right.

+++++

"Is Chuck here?"

Yancy looks at him, askance, hair disheveled and clothing rumpled. Raleigh wasn’t really expecting him to be alone, and now, facing him, he’s not sure who he wants to see more. “Why do you care where he is?” he asks in a heartbreakingly neutral voice.

"He was in your room."

Not even a raised eyebrow. Yancy just stares blearily back. “Yeah. He hasn't been sleeping well since Lima. Seems to do better with me."

Raleigh feels lightheaded, manic. “So you have been sleeping with him?"

“Sleeping. Not fucking.”

"Really?"

And at that, Yancy looks at him. Finally. Terribly - there is nothing but raw anger in his eyes. “After what he’s been through? If he needs some fucking sleep, he deserves to have it."

“And what about me?” Raleigh whispers, desperate now, not caring if the words make him feel like that spoiled brat Chuck accused him earlier of being. 

All he wants right now - all he has ever wanted - is for Yancy to touch him. Claim him. Make him feel safe again. He hasn't felt safe since Knifehead, and a not insignificant part of him wants nothing more than to crawl into Yancy's lap like a little boy and be held.

“Did I force you... into... this? That?” he continues, forcing the words out, almost choking on them nonetheless. “What we had, did? Did you not want that?”

His brother's eyes soften. "Oh, kiddo," he murmurs, and reaches for him. “I wanted you to have what you needed.”

It sounds a lot more like the old Yancy, the one who used to comfort him in the night and play ball with him in the yard, who was his everything, and Raleigh closes his eyes in relief, sagging forward into those...

But no. He can’t. Can’t get lost in the memories, can he?

“But what about what you needed?”

Yancy's fingers inch up his shoulder at that, thread through his hair. "Raleigh, you're my brother and you were my first time and my whole life, and I'll never love anybody like I love you. I can never love anybody like I love you.” 

Raleigh’s insides twist. His palms feel weak. But he forces himself to say it. “If you want Chuck...”

“I want you both,” Yancy whispers, and lifts his face, stroking Raleigh’s cheeks until his eyes open. His brother’s face is pinched, sad. “I love you both.”

His protest blossoms before he can stop it. “But...”

“Shh, don’t,” Yancy says, and puts a finger to his lips. “What you and I have, it’s not normal, Raleigh, but it’s still sort of the same. I loved you from the first moment I saw you, when Mom brought you home from the hospital. Love at first sight, little brother. That’s what we had. Don’t you dare,” and his voice goes steely, “tell me that’s not possible for anybody else.”

Raleigh swallows. “Me and Chuck...”

“It’s okay to love him too,” Yancy says. “It’s okay.”

But it’s not.

But - even falling into the warmth of those words, eyes open again - Raleigh notices. 

The half-packed ruck. Folded clothes. All the old patterns, how everything else is laid out, and...

And, terrified, he shoves Yancy away.

"You're leaving?!”

"I have to go, kid, there's this thing I need to do, and..."

"I need you!” he yells, frantic now, advancing back on his brother. “Please, Yance, you... you can’t leave me again!”

Yancy sags against the wall. “I don’t expect you to understand, Rals, but...”

“How could I?! You haven’t told me anything, Chuck wouldn’t tell me anything, I don’t even know where you’ve fucking _been_ all these years, and...”

“Wouldn’t?” Yancy blinks. He’s exhausted, barely functioning, and Raleigh wonders if he got any sleep at all last night. Yancy was never any good without sleep. “You talked to him today?”

“Yeah, no shit, this morning, when I came by...”

Yancy’s face clouds in confusion, like he hadn’t considered this to be a possibility, Raleigh coming by, but before either Becket brother can get any further, a cell phone rings.

Eyes still on his little brother, hand out, as if in supplication to stay, Yancy pulls it slowly out. “Scott?” he asks quietly, and then freezes. “Chuck? Chuck, where are you?”

“That’s what I was saying, Yance, he left the ‘Dome earlier and...”

Yancy holds up his palm, pacing now. Phone to his ear. “Chuck, why are you calling me for this?” Silence. “Yeah, kiddo, I understand that, but you...” Pause. “Fuck, call 999, not me!” 

999? Raleigh swallows, coming up behind Yancy. On the phone, tinny through the speaker, he can hear sobbing. It cuts right through him. Chuck never cries. “Yance, please...”

“Shut up, Rals... no, Chuck, Chuck, it’s okay! Don’t hang up!” Yancy glares at Raleigh, pacing away again. “Chuck, baby, okay, okay, tell me where you...”

The room goes silent. The line dead.

Raleigh holds a hand out, takes a step forward.

And Yancy just hurtles the phone as hard as he can at the wall. Stunned, Raleigh barely registers his brother moving until there’s a hand on his collar, jerking him forward.

“What the fuck did you two talk about?” Yancy growls, voice dangerous, fingers steel tight. “What did you say to him?”

“Yance, I don’t... is he okay?”

“What. Did. You. Talk. About?”

“W-We fought, he called me a spoiled brat...”

“Jesus. What did you say to him?”

“Nothing! He screamed at me and stormed out!” Raleigh snaps, and shakes Yancy off, stares at him, helpless. He doesn’t even want to attempt to resolve the turmoil in his gut right now. “What the fuck is going on?”

But Yancy just sags, hands scrubbing through his hair, shoulders sagging. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do for you, either of you. You don’t listen, you don’t care, you don’t care what this is fucking doing to me and...”

Raleigh frowns. “Yancy...”

“I never taught you what a relationship was, did I?” Yancy continues, like he hasn’t even heard him. “I just wanted you to be happy so I never talked to you about any of it, never challenged you, couldn’t raise you, be your parent or whatever, and look what I did, to both of you, because I up and left you and then I didn’t come home and...”

Raleigh kneels down between his brother’s knees, hands rubbing across his thighs. “What the fuck is going on? Where’s Chuck?”

Yancy blinks. His eyes are glassy with exhaustion. “He didn’t say.”

“Yance...”

“I can’t do this, Raleigh, I can’t clean up your mess this time, or his, I’m sorry, I just... I can’t, and...”

He doesn’t notice his hand shaking until he’s reaching for his brother’s cheek. Still, Raleigh lands it, pulls that handsome face up. 

“Where’s Chuck?”

Yancy closes his eyes. “I don’t know.” Raleigh has never heard him sound so defeated. “Bone Slums, I’m guessing.”

“I’ll go get him. I’ll go get him, if you won’t.”

The look in Yancy’s eyes, as they fix on his, it’s scary.

But his brother makes no effort to move.

So Raleigh leaves him there.

Runs to the motor pool.

+++++

The ocean is burning, when Raleigh Becket appears from out of it.

The ocean is burning, and his entire body is on fire, time stretching out and folding back into itself. It doesn’t hurt - nothing hurts here, not like it hurts out there, where Raleigh is, where Raleigh is kneeling down.

Raleigh shouldn’t be here.

This place, this place isn’t supposed to...

He tries to squirm away from the heavy hand that falls through thirty thousand feet of water to land on his skin, but he’s drowning under the waves and he can’t he can’t he can’t just...

_Chuck? Chuck, jesus, are you... what did you take?_

The voice is ancient, and it’s booming at him from out of the past, and Chuck wants to answer, but sound can’t travel backwards against the gradient flow of the spacetime drift like that, so he just moans instead, and curls up into himself, hoping Yancy will come, bright gold and endless against this thing that wants to...

He called him, didn’t he? Managed to bang out the number on Striker’s comm pad as it all hit him wrong, before the world warped, before his arm was bleeding from the injection site. Called Yancy. 

He doesn’t want this, he doesn’t want to be back here, Yancy was so warm, so warm, and...

_Chuck? Where’s your phone, babe? Please, Chuck, it’s okay, you’re gonna be okay..._

Yancy had said that, Yancy had said that on the phone, and...

“Y-Yancy?” he struggles to croak - and an effort, it’s an effort, there’s no air this far down, Mako’s air was failing too, and...

_It’s Raleigh, Chuck, please._

Time dilates, and extends, the fire consuming everything

Somebody’s holding his hand, anchoring him against that endless darkness that lives down here.

And doesn’t let go.

He holds onto that, even as the sirens start screaming in the distance, and all he can see is that Cat Five, rising up from the end of the world.

+++++

“What did he take?”

“I made some calls. Chau’s on it. Gonna bring me the fucker who sold it to him.”

“Herc...”

“Leave it, Yance.”

Yancy swallows, and looks back into the room, with its team of doctors, the mass of medical equipment, dwarfing the patient on the bed. He spent the first ten hours, after Raleigh arrived with him at Queen Mary, under anesthesia, a cocktail of drugs Yancy can’t pronounce being pumped through his system, trying to clean out whatever he took. They brought him out here, to the recovery room, a few hours ago. 

Where Raleigh’s sitting by his side, nodded off in a chair.

Nobody’s bothering him. Not even Herc, who looks like he’s gone ten rounds with a Cat-V, Max curled tiredly, protectively, around his legs. Probably haven’t slept in a couple of days. Either of them. 

Who the fuck knows? 

Yancy’s too tired himself to ask. 

LOCCENT had, with Chuck’s cell phone information, been able to together a rough path of his wanderings that day. Through the city, into the Bone Slums, a meandering path. How long had Chuck been fighting the need? Waiting for somebody to come? Wishing... before he injected whatever the fuck it was he injected?

 _The best care,_ Herc’s been assured at least six times since Yancy got here. _The best care for your son, Marshall Hansen, the very best._

Yancy’s sure it is.

Nobody wants to see Chuck Hansen, hero of Pitfall or whatever the fuck, die of a bad hit.

“How’s the op coming along?”

And fuck, fucking op. It’s going to be a nightmare, this run, straight into the heart of CCP-occupied territory, through some of the worst terrain on the goddamn planet, and what they’ll find there could be...

“You want to talk about that right now, sir?”

“You wanna talk about this?” Herc growls. Max, at his feet, barks.

Yancy blanches. “No, sir.”

“How’s the op?”

“Wheels up in a few hours, if I’m gonna make the rendezvous.”

“Don’t miss that, Yancy.”

“But Chuck... Raleigh...”

“They’ll understand.” 

He grinds a palm into his forehead. His bag - singular, only the one - is packed, ready to go. Everything he is. Nothing of importance. They’ll buy or steal anything else they need along the way.

It’s all out there.

He’s all out there.

“Herc...”

“Your brother’s right there, Yancy. I’m not stopping you.”

Inside, Chuck’s moving. Raleigh’s leaning over him. They’re... talking, maybe, and something in Yancy’s chest clenches up.

He can’t do this.

He can’t.

And he hates himself for it.

But if he’s going back out there, to face what they’ll face.

“Take care of them for me, Herc,” he says quietly.

The Marshall doesn’t look away from his son for a second. Not even to nod

+++++

"He's like dad," Chuck says, rail thin, gray, pitying, as they stand together in the empty room. "His whole life's been nothing but duty."

Raleigh closes his eyes, as the truth of that ricochets through him. Duty. Of course. What else has Yancy ever had? Family, his little siblings, the PPDC, Herc's missions. He hasn't been free in a long time. 

Yancy’s never been free. 

And he hates himself, for how angry this all makes him. How selfishly, childishly, angry. 

Because Yancy is gone.

Yancy is gone, and he didn’t even say goodbye. Didn’t even come by the hospital yesterday, to say goodbye.

“Raleigh? You’re green, mate.”

He feels like he’s going to pass out. He breathes, deep as he can, nostrils only. “I can't do this alone,” Raleigh offers, when he has air again.

And it hurts, to say that. Because he's the reason. He's the reason for all of this.

He might have saved the world - saved Mako, saved his co-pilot, when he couldn’t before. But that feels very hollow right now, staring at the empty room in front of him.

All he's done. All he had in front of him. A chance. A chance to do it right, get it right, be a better brother, a better lover, love Yancy the way Yancy deserved, deserves.

And he wants to hit himself for thinking it. For being angry about that.

That that’s been taken away from him now.

Away from all of them.

That this thing...

“I never...”

“No, you never did think about it, did you?”

“Chuck, I...”

But Chuck’s gone.

Alone, Raleigh sinks to his knees in the empty room.

He sleeps there that night, wrapped up in the harsh-laundered issue sheets that smell like Yancy, and it's almost too much to bear. So Raleigh drags himself out before dawn, out to the helipad where he first arrived in Hong Kong, overlooking the calm, gray sea, mind empty and heart gorged out.

Until he thinks of something.

Something that just might.

+++++

Chuck hates the elliptical.

He uses it anyway.

Four days after the bad dose. Four days, and Yancy is gone.

He wants to hate him, but he can’t. Chuck never saw what dad kept in that dark place, those Class of ’15 things, but he felt enough around it to have some kind of idea about what Yancy might be up to.

Important things.

More important than him.

It hurts. It still hurts.

He’s been trying to avoid all of it. Raleigh. Yancy. Everyone else. 

It’s easier to just come in here. Use the elliptical, punish himself with the memories of Striker's treads, caught up in the grief of it all, until...

Until a piece of paper is shoved in his face.

"Oi," he barks, trying to bat it away.

But there's Raleigh, holding it.

Grief warring with hope on his perfect fucking handsome face.

Chuck's feet stutter to a stop. And he swings there, breathing a little too hard, eyeing Raleigh suspiciously.

He doesn’t remember much. The hospital. Raleigh there. Raleigh staying there. They talked - he doesn’t remember much of that, either, but it felt good. In his dreams, he heard Raleigh say _I love you_. Dreams. He thinks.

He hasn’t asked.

He hasn’t dared.

"What's this then, Becket?"

"Plane tickets. One for Max, too. Had to get him his own seat, but they were really nice about it once I told them it was for _the_ Chuck Hansen, and it's winter right now down there and I figured if you still want to learn now's the best time, even if you still might be a...a little sick, we'll..."

Chuck ignores him, readying a pithy insult, and then he really looks at the print-out.

"This is business class."

"Yeah, well, between my shit arm and that pain you get in your legs sometimes..."

"To Christchurch?"

"That's what you wanted, wasn't it?" 

Raleigh looks like how Chuck feels; about ready to burst into tears. 

"Learn how to snowboard?"

Chuck feels hot. Like he's going to faint. How does Raleigh even remember that discussion? Why? That was the morning...that was when...

"Maybe I don't wanna go to New Zealand no more," Chuck counters, paper crumpling in his hands, seemingly of its own accord. "Especially not with you."

"Chuck, I know I fucked up, but..."

 _Fucked up?_ he wants to scream. _Fucked up doesn’t begin to cover it._

But he remembers Raleigh’s face from that alley.

So Chuck stares at the tickets.

That's a future right there.  A happy one.  He can see it.

Them.  Max.  Some old van and hobbit country.  Bad food and spoiled camp-outs and lots of photographs.  Learning how to smile at each other, for a change, to joke instead of cut, rolling because it's fun and not because they want to kill each other.  Snowboarding lessons, filled with little touches that change over time, shifting when they aren't paying attention, when they're laughing instead of yelling.  When one of them finally gathers the courage to kiss again, kiss for the first time, like they never did before, and everything they should have done right, done right.  

This time.  A chance to get things right.

Maybe with Yancy, Yancy coming home, Yancy coming home to both of them, a little more battered and worn, exhausted, just falling into their arms and asleep by the time they manage to wrestle him into bed.  They could sit up late with cocoa and Kaluha and talk about what they're going to do next, and Yancy would just be there in the morning, big perfect Yancy with his big perfect hands, there to massage and kiss and cuddle all the doubt, all the worry, make things...

_How the fuck am I supposed to trust you... when I want to trust you... when I can't trust myself... when I'll just let you hurt me again, hurt me and I'll pretend to enjoy it... waiting for Yancy to come home and fix everything, make it whole, make it..._

But Yancy's not coming home.

Yancy never really did.

That killer's walk of his.

He knows where he's going.  Where he ends.  How.

And as lost as Chuck is - with Striker Eureka atomized dust on the abyssal plain and mum a flash shadow in his fading memories - to take such a retreat as this, as good as it would be... 

 _You'll do it again,_ he almost says.  

_Yancy wants me, not you._

_He'll come back for me.  I don't have to be with you for him to want me._

But he can't get the words out.

He doesn’t know if it’s true.

Not with the devastation on Raleigh's face.  Not with those words.

"Chuck... I'm... I thought you said you... we’d said...”

Feelings aren't so easy to turn off, and he hasn't had much practice with this variety, and nothing in his life ever prepared him for anything like this.

So he says nothing.

Maybe Raleigh's yelling at him, calling for him, screaming for him to come back.  Maybe Raleigh watches in silence, and all that clamor is only the sound of his own heart breaking through his ribs.  Chuck's not sure.  Doesn't really want to remember.

He doesn't want to remember any of this. The feel of Raleigh's cock, the taste of Yancy's lips, pale skin and blue eyes looking at him like he's worth more than his goddamn kill count, in a world that will never need to kill kaiju again.

Max is waiting for him, whining as he crashes into Herc’s room, and Herc is there, to catch him and wrap him up in a hug and hold onto him as his body tries to shake itself apart.  

It's not what he wants. But it's enough.

For now.

Just.

++++

Raleigh doesn't understand, as he watches Chuck run, as what’s left of him falls to dust.

He doesn't understand at all.


	11. Chapter 11

Yancy hasn't bothered to look at the GPS in three days.  Doesn't matter much where they are; the interior's the same everywhere.  Desert.  Termites. Roos, of all body shapes and arrangements.  Stars - so many stars, above those clouds that speak to the arrival of the rainy season, and it's a relief, after so many months in the poisonous skies of Beijing, to see the stars, free and high and beyond any human reproach.

Their contact will be here tomorrow.  Or maybe the day after. Or maybe ten clicks from here. No matter, they’ll find each other.  The tribesmen in this part of the world don't run off clocks, just the rhythm of the sun and the moon and the things that came before.  

Oral tradition is still alive and well here.  Stories, handed down, perfectly, generation after generation.

The access codes to their satellite will be safe, the commands that would open the uplink, grant access to the database, if the kaiju ever return.  All that tech, up there in the stars.  The orbit will decay, the satellite burn up over Russia, before the people of this land forget.  Hundreds of years, it should be safe.

The oldest civilization on the planet.  Protecting the most devastating weapon the most advanced civilizations ever produced.

There's always been something poetic in that.

He’s thought about that, the last six times he’s done this run.

At the moment, he doesn't really care.

The last six months have been...

Well. If he could have it scrubbed from his brain, Spotless Sunshine style, he would. Even if it meant a lobotomy.

Still. This week in the desert’s been nice.

Everything considered.

World's safe.

That has to count for something.

Has to count.

It's all he's got now.

"I know where they are," Herc says, quiet.  Pensive.  Scott's laid up in a Vladivostok private hospital, the same one that took care of Yancy, all those years ago, under the same people.  He might wake up.  He probably won't.  Yancy did his best.  Herc hasn't really been the same since he heard the news.  "You should go see 'em."

"Why?" 

"That's what you wanted, isn't it?"

 _Why the fuck are you being so supportive now?_ he wants to demand, but then, he's not the one with a brother in a persistent vegetative state, three bullets lodged in his spinal column, so he doesn't give it air.

"Doesn't matter what I want," he says, shoving a bare foot against a wide rock, ignoring the shadows dancing on the sand around him.  He's still not quite used to the sight of his missing toes, but it hasn't been as hard to walk as he thought it would be.  Least the fucking things have finally healed up.  Doctors didn't close up the incisions with skin flaps, trying to save as much as possible.  Frostbite's a bitch that way.  "I'd just make 'em miserable."

"Family's..."

"Don't," he warns.

Herc sighs a little, volumes, for him.  "You were... I'd hoped..."

"What, that I'd fix your kid for you?  Get my broken little brother under control?"

"Don't put words in my mouth, Becket!"

"Yeah, I know."  The water in his Camelbak is still hot from the day's hike.  "I know, Herc.  I shouldn't have come back.  Should have stayed gone the first time.  I'm not making that mistake again."

"Chuck needs..."

"Chuck needs to figure out who he is first, live his own life, be his own man for a little while, before he throws in with some fucked-up, chewed-up old spook like me."  He thinks about that for a second.  "Or Raleigh, for that matter.  He'll never forgive me.  And maybe that's good, maybe that's what he needs, to... to get over this bullshit idea about love and romance and whatever the fuck that he's been so fucking lost in, doesn't even make any goddamn sense..."

"Yance..."

"Men like us, you and me, we don't belong anywhere, Herc, we don't belong with anyone.  I don't..." He bites it back, the little _I don't deserve either of them,_ because maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but it's not something he can say out loud and live with himself afterward.  

It's not a matter of merit.  Never has been.  It's more about... 

"It's okay.  It's okay if they hate me."   _I can take that for them, I'd only have to explain and they don't want the explanations, that heartbreak is a shared trauma, I'd have to apologize and they'd have to apologize and I can't expect that I can't get that Rals won't Chuck shouldn't I shouldn't want that wouldn't be fair even though I n..._  "It's better this way."

"I'm sorry I did this to you," Herc says quietly.  "I'm sorry."

And he sighs, scrubs a hand over a tired face.  Everybody.  Everybody blaming themselves for what somebody else did to them, and he can’t get the smell of cordite out of his hands. A fucking waste, all of it.  "I did this to myself."

"Doesn't mean you don't deserve something for yourself, Yance."

"Doesn't mean I have to put this," and he waves at himself, "back on them."

"They'd both probably..."

"Leave it alone, Herc."  He snorts.  "Don't think I'm doing this for me.  So just leave it the fuck alone."

"Don't you even want to know where they are?"

"Of course I do," he says.

Herc doesn't tell him.  Yancy doesn't ask.

Doesn't dare.

The fire burns down. 

Yancy's sinuses sting, his eye water.

Probably just the dust.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like I've said... thanks for putting up with me and my personal vent-fic, y'all. *sighs*


End file.
